Price’s 16-May-2016 email message to the British Library re: the Hand D Additions to Sir Thomas More.
Day #: no change in the British Library's claim that The Book of Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare's only surviving literary
manuscript. Update September 2016: the claim can now be found here.

Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi discuss the authorship question in a YouTube video.
At approximately 3:02 into the video, Mark holds up his copy of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography and recommends it to viewers.
See his blurb on the back cover
of the paperback edition on the homepage of this website.

Update April 2016:

Diana Price’s article “William Shakespeare: Syrian Refugee Advocate?” is published on the
American Thinker website.
The article was prompted by the announcement, made by the British Library in March 2016, of a project to digitize early modern manuscripts,
one of which is the collaborative play The Book of Sir Thomas More. According to the
British Library’s website,
the Hand D Additions constitute “Shakespeare’s only surviving literary manuscript.” Price’s article challenges that identification with reference to her
Journal of Early Modern Studies research paper,
published shortly before the British Library’s announcement. The announcement appeared in numerous media worldwide.

Update March 2016:

The website has been redesigned. Remnants of the previous website may be found here.

Update March 2016:

Price’s research paper on the Sir Thomas More manuscript, titled “Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail”
is now published in the
Journal of Early Modern Studies,
Jems 5 (University of Florence, 2016).

Update March/April 2016:

A special event, “Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: A Celebration,” commemorated the 400th anniversary of
Shakespeare’s death, Sunday, April 24, at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. The event featured Keir Cutler speaking
about his work, Shakespeare Crackpot and keynote remarks by Diana Price.

Prof. Stanley Wells concedes Price’s thesis again, this time in his comments published online in a Dec. 26, 2014 article in
Newsweek (under the misleading title “The Campaign to Prove Shakespeare Didn't Exist”):

Stanley Wells, in his Stratford office, sighs at having to repeat all the points he’s made over the years about Shakespeare’s identity. For
him, there is no mystery: “Yes, there are gaps in the records, as there are for most non-aristocratic people. We do, however,
have documentary records and there’s lots of posthumous evidence. There’s evidence in the First Folio, the memorial in the church here
in Stratford, the poem by William Basse referring to him, all of it stating that Shakespeare of Stratford was a poet,” he says.
…
What would settle this question for good? “I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime,” says Wells. “There’s lots and lots of unexamined legal records rotting away in the national archives; it is just possible something will one day turn up. That would shut the buggers up!” [emphasis added]

“The best scholarly book by a non-Shakespearean is Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, by
Diana Price[5].
I wrote several blogs recently[6] trying
to refute her claims in that book. She knows a great deal; it’s just a great shame that her knowledge is put to such ignoble ends. The anti-Shakespeareans are
not necessarily ignorant people, some of them know a great deal. Nevertheless there’s something in their psyches that compels or persuades them to deny what
seem to me to be obvious truths.…This Brunel University in England, although they claim they’re not anti-Shakespearean, nevertheless has given
honorary degrees to Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and Vanessa Redgrave. They give honorary degrees to the three anti-Shakespeareans who are most prominent in the
public eye.

Some of them come out in favor of a particular candidate, and it’s interesting that Derek Jacobi was Marlowe until a few years ago until
he was paid for being in the film about the earl of Oxford. Mark [Rylance] is more circumspect. He’s more happy nowadays just to take the view that it wasn’t
Shakespeare. Diana Price is the same. Her book does not propound any specific candidate, it’s just saying that the evidence is against Shakespeare of Stratford.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2003

LETTERS

The Door’s Open

To the Editor:

The singular fact is that after 400
years, the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays remains an open
question – no side has been able to
close the sale. The greatest strength
of the case for the man from Stratford
is his incumbency, but no
understanding of that case is complete
without reference to Diana Price’s
“Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.”

Wayne Shore

San Antonio

Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography :
New Evidence of an Authorship Problem

This book re-opens
the Authorship Question with an arsenal of new information and
powerful arguments. It is the first major authorship book since
1916 without an ideological bias, the first to introduce new evidence,
and the first to undertake a systematic comparative analysis with
other literary biographies. It was released in 2001 as no. 94 in
Greenwood Press’s academic series, “Contributions in Drama and
Theatre Studies,” making it the first book on the subject to be
published in a peer-reviewed series. The updated paperback
edition is now available.

Among the new evidence and arguments introduced in this book:

Comparative analysis of literary papers trails for Shakespeare and two dozen of his contemporaries

Analysis of documentation showing that Shakespeare was a theatrical financier and business agent

Comparative analysis and interpretation of Groatsworth of Wit and Vertue’s Commonwealth

Analysis of Jonson’s “De Shakespeare Nostrati” and the significance of Jonson’s classical sources

Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography
proposes that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a successful
entrepreneur, financier, play broker, businessman, theater
shareholder, real estate tycoon, commodity trader, money-lender,
and actor, but not a dramatist. It further proposes that the
works of “William Shakespeare” were written by an
unnamed gentleman. This book exposes logical fallacies and
contradictions in the traditional accounts of Shakespeare’s
whereabouts; his professional activities; his personality profile;
chronology; autobiographical “echoes” in the plays; the
dramatist’s education and cultural sophistication; circumstances
of publication of the plays and poetry; and in particular, the
testimony of playwright Ben Jonson. Citations are drawn almost
entirely from orthodox sources. The book includes 33
illustrations, a bibliography, and an index.

Price has been seen in two documentaries for TV, Last Will. And Testament,
broadcast in 2012-2014 on various PBS affiliates, and Claus Bredenbrock’s 2013 The Naked Shakespeare,
produced for the Florian Film Group and broadcast on various (European) ARTE affiliates.
Her research paper, “Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail,” was
published in March 2016 by the University of Florence’s
Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS 5). She contributed
a chapter titled “My Shakspere: ‘A Conjectural Narrative’ Continued” published in
My Shakespeare: The Authorship Controversy, ed. William Leahy, in March 2018. Her research is presented in the Feb. 2019 online journal,
Critical Stages 18.

Price has published a variety of articles on related topics in peer-reviewed journals and magazines.
Her article “Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument” (The Review of English Studies, 1997) introduced the first known image of Shakespeare’s funerary monument.
Price debated Prof. Donald Foster in The Shakespeare Newsletter (1996 and 1997), and her articles
are cited in Counterfeiting Shakespeare by Brian Vickers (September 2002) and Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza in Shakespeare Quarterly (June 1997).
Her essay proposing a solution to Philip Henslowe’s puzzling annotation “ne” appeared in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (2003),
and her article “Evidence for A Literary Biography” was published in the fall 2004 issue of the Tennessee Law Review (2004). Her review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, ed.
Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) is posted on Amazon US, Amazon UK, and,
with full bibliography, here.

She has lectured at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Tennessee Law School, Cleveland Public Library, California State University (LA), Cleveland State University, the University of North Carolina (Greensboro), John Carroll University, Griffith University (Brisbane), the Cleveland Renaissance/Early Modern Seminar, as well as numerous civic organizations.

The Shakespeare’s Unorthodox BiographyFaceBook page
is a place to discuss the book, see
news about the book, and learn about Diana Price’s research and publications on controversial topics in Shakespeare studies.

Much Ado About Something A Documentary Film by Mike Rubbo (April 2002).
“Diana Price has written one of the best books making the case against
Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.. It was an inspiration in
the final stages of making the film.”

Greensboro News & Record (by Trudy Atkins, 22 July 2001): “In this unique biography,
Diana Price has researched every shred of evidence about the Stratford-born Shakspere,
analyzing and interpreting literary allusions as well. What makes her biography
unique is her examination of the same evidence for other writers of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean periods. Her research seems to point to an overwhelming conclusion: that someone
else wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.”

Choice (by D. Traister, May 2001):
“A deeply uninteresting exploration of a question that, for most scholars, is even
more deeply unnecessary. Collections with a focus on Shakespeare and a fetishistic
desire for “completeness” will acquire the book. So too might collections that
specialize in extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.”

Academia: an Online Magazine and Resource for Academic Librarians
(by Rob Norton, Jan. 2001, Vol. 1, No. 6),
Profilers' Pick:
“Price argues compellingly that there is little evidence
from life that the Stratfordian was the playwright William
Shakespeare and that most of what we do know of Shakspere would
make it impossible that he could have written plays and poetry
clearly aristocratic in context, vocabulary, and sensibility.
This book would be a good first stop for those seeking some
introduction into this controversy and allow them to proceed
intelligently to books written by those who have strong opinions
as to the real identity of the Bard.”

Book News, Inc. (Portland, OR;
booknews.com): “Price jumps into the eternal controversy
with the unusual position of having no candidate to promote.
Based on a systematic comparative analysis with other literary
biographies, known biographical facts, and contemporary
commentary, she concludes that William Shakespeare was the pen
name of some anonymous aristocrat.”

Library Journal (15 November 2000): “Gives the Shakespeare doubters
some very good ammunition…. Academic libraries should buy
this book for the debate it will spark and the in-depth detective
work it provides. Public libraries can safely pass.”

Northern Ohio Live magazine (by Michael L. Hays,
April 2001): “The best unorthodox biography of Shakespeare in years. Well-researched and
challenging … Price is the first to compare Shakespeare to a number of his
contemporaries with respect to personal literary evidence. Her conclusion:
He is unique in lacking any.”

The Elizabethan Review
(by Warren Hope, 11/20/00): “Her book [is] unlike any book dealing
with the Shakespeare authorship question that has appeared in
years. … [It] tackles the question of who William Shakspere of
Stratford actually was - a subject that has been too frequently
ignored by Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians alike… .
Price works that field admirably and the harvest is abundant.”
For the full review, click on Hope.

The Plain Dealer
(Cleveland, OH, by Marianne Evett, 12/18/00):
“Faulty logic and lack of knowledge of the broader social and theatrical
milieu of the time undermine her argument. She uses a double
standard for evidence.” For the author’s response,
click on Response to Plain Dealer.

These two studies share much material about Shakespeare’s life and work but their
objectives and their methods are sharply contrasted…

Price writes a polemic which is engaged in promoting a view of Shakespeare’s life and
examining evidence about it, whether in its support or in rejection of such a view…

Because the material she reviews and the evidence she adduces and discusses are so wide
ranging the book is interesting and stimulating. It is apparent that many questions might
be asked about the details which have grown up around the life of Shakespeare… .

In spite of the polemical approach to some of these issues the book does point to and
leave open for further examination a considerable number of fascinating problems
generated in the canon and the life of Shakespeare…

The discussion of whether Hand D in Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare’s is intriguing in
view of the limited basis for comparison of attested samples of Shakespeare’s
handwriting which are so few. These are but a sample of the questions which Price raises
and one might hope that they will stimulate further enquiry.

It is a woman, ironically, who lands the strongest shot of the battle, who sends the Stratford man
to the canvas with exactly that: “documentary evidence,” evidence that no one on the Wells’ team seems
able to stand up and refute. This solidest of evidentiary blows references authorship scholar Diana
Price and her own extraordinary book (Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography). It is Price who brings into
the battle some two dozen dramatists from the period. A core part of the Shahan book, she looks at each
writer in terms of education, correspondence concerning literary matters, proof of being paid to write,
relationships to wealthy patrons, existence of original manuscripts, documents touching on literary matters,
commendatory poems contributed or received during their lifetimes, documents where the alleged writer was
actually referred to as a writer, evidence of books owned or borrowed, and even notices at death of being
a writer. Such evidence, we find out, exists in some or even all of these categories for each of the writers
studied. For the Stratford man, however, not a single check in a single category. Stratford comes up blank.

I am grateful to Professor Stanley Wells for following up on Ros Barber’s challenge to him and Paul Edmondson
(eds., Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, Cambridge University Press, 2013,
launched at the ‘Proving Shakespeare’ Webinar, Friday 26 April 2013). Barber criticized their collection of
essays for failing to engage in the arguments presented in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem ([SUB] Greenwood Press 2001; paperback 2013). As the first academic book published
on the subject, it surely should have been addressed in essays relevant to Shakespeare’s biography. But better late than never.

In his review on Blogging Shakespeare
(May 8, 2013), Prof. Wells takes issue with any number of details in my book, but he does not directly confront the single strongest
argument I offer: the comparative analysis of documentary evidence supporting the biographies of Shakespeare and two dozen of his contemporaries.
That analysis demonstrates that the literary activities of the two dozen other writers are documented in varying degrees. However,
none of the evidence that survives for Shakespeare can support the statement that he was a writer by vocation.

Wells is aware of this argument; in the Webinar, he alludes to Andrew Hadfield’s counter-argument, as first expressed in
Hadfield’s 60-second video on the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website.

Question 16: Should we be concerned that there are gaps in [Shakespeare’s] historical record?
… My favourite non-fact is that, although Thomas Nashe is, I think, the only English writer ever to have forced the
authorities to close down the theatres and printing presses, making him something of a celebrity, we do not know when or how he died.
Traces of Shakespeare, though scanty, do not require special explanation. Or, alternatively, we could imagine that a whole host of writers
who emerged in the late sixteenth century, were imposters.

Hadfield repeats this explanation in his 2012 biography, Edmund Spenser: A Life (4).
And it is true: we do not know how or when Nashe died. But we do know that Nashe left behind:

a handwritten verse in Latin, composed during his university days. His letter to William Cotton … refers to
his frustrations “writing for the stage and for the press.” A 1593 letter by Carey reports that “Nashe hath dedicated a book unto you [Carey’s wife] …
Will Cotton will disburse … your reward to him.” Carey also refers to Nashe’s imprisonment for “writing against the Londoners.” (SUB, 118)

Hadfield claims that, as with Nashe’s life, there are similar “frustrating gaps” in the lives of, for example, Thomas Lodge and John Webster.
But Lodge refers to his books in personal correspondence and in a dedication, expresses gratitude to the earl of Derby’s father, who “incorporated
me into your house.” There are payments to Webster for writing plays, and he exchanged personal commendatory verses with his friends Thomas Heywood
and William Rowley. There is no comparable literary evidence for Shakespeare.
Further contradicting his claim about the absence of literary evidence for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Hadfield can cite solid literary evidence for Spenser.
Such personal literary paper trails include his transcription of neo-Latin poetry in a book that he once owned, records of his
education at Merchant Taylor’s and Pembroke Hall, and his handwritten inscription in a book he gave to Gabriel Harvey. There is no comparable evidence for Shakespeare.
Yet Wells takes comfort that Hadfield’s explanations are true. From the Webinar
Wells introduces

Theorising Shakespeare’s authorship by Andrew Hadfield… . That chapter really is incredibly helpful,
I think, because it’s, its about helping us all to relax about that fact that we shouldn’t be worried
about there being gaps in the records of people’s lives, or, that the kinds of records that we would
most wish to see in someone’s life don’t in fact survive and aren’t there.

But the absence of personal literary paper trails for Elizabethan or Jacobean writers of any consequence is not a common phenomenon;
rather, the absence of any literary paper trails for Shakespeare’s biography is a unique deficiency. In the Webinar, Wells expresses
“no objection whatever to the validity of posthumous evidence.” Posthumous evidence can be useful, but it does not carry the same weight
as contemporaneous evidence. Historians and critics alike make that distinction
(see, e.g., here).
Wells relies, as he must, on the posthumous testimony in the First Folio to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
But even if he accepts the testimony in the First Folio at face value, no questions asked, no ambiguities acknowledged,
he is still left with the embarrassing fact that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period for
whom he must rely on posthumous evidence to make his case.

Wells has himself commented on the paucity of evidence. In his essay “Current Issues in Shakespeare’s Biography,”
he admits that trying to write Shakespeare’s biography is like putting together “a jigsaw puzzle for which
most of the pieces are missing” (5); he then cites Duncan-Jones who “in a possibly unguarded moment, said that
Shakespeare biographies are 5% fact and 95% padding” (7). One difference, then, is that my work has no need
for “guarded” moments, particularly as I re-evaluate that 5%.

Instead, of confronting the deficiency of literary evidence in the Shakespeare biography, Wells instead takes
exception to particular statements and details in my book.

For example, he criticizes my references to Shakespeare’s
illiterate household in Stratford, while at the same time I acknowledge that daughter Susanna could sign her name.
And yes, she did, once. She made one “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of
doing with the pen” (Maunde Thompson, 1:294), but she was unable to recognize her own husband’s handwriting.
Her sister Judith signed with a mark. That evidence does not support literacy in the household; it points
instead to functional illiteracy.
In another criticism, Wells states that:

Price misleadingly says that ‘there are ‘no commendatory verses to Shakespeare’, ignoring those printed in the First Folio as well
as the anonymous prose commendation in the 1609 edition of Troilus and Cressida and that by Thomas Walkley in the 1622 quarto of Othello.

In this criticism and elsewhere, Wells disregards the criteria used to distinguish between personal and impersonal evidence, explicit or
ambiguous evidence, and so on. Such criteria are routinely used by historians, biographers,
and critics (SUB, 309 and here).
The prefatory material for Troilus and Othello necessitate no personal knowledge of the author and could have
been written after having read or seen the play in question. (As pointed out above, the prefatory material
in the First Folio is problematic, but the complexities require over a chapter in my book to analyze.)

“Price downplays William Basse’s elegy on Shakespeare … which circulated widely in manuscript – at least 34 copies are known –
before and after it was published in 1633, and she fails to note that one of the copies is headed ‘bury’d at Stratford vpon Avon,
his Town of Nativity’. Yes, and another version reads “On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare. He dyed in Aprill 1616.” There are various additional derivative titles.

I “downplay” this elegy for several reasons. Its authorship remains in question; it may have been written by John Donne, to whom
it is attributed in Donne’s Poems of 1633. There is no evidence that either Basse or Donne knew Shakespeare.
And yes, the elegy does exist in numerous manuscript copies; the one allegedly in Basse’s handwriting is tentatively dated 1626
and shows one blot and correction in an otherwise clean copy– suggesting that it might be a transcript.

The poem itself contains no evidence that the author was personally acquainted with Shakespeare.
Whether by Donne or Basse, it is a posthumous and impersonal tribute, requiring familiarity with Shakespeare’s works,
and, possibly, details on the funerary monument in Stratford. Wells and Taylor themselves cannot be
certain which manuscript title (if any) represents the original (Textual, 163).

Wells concludes that “of course, she can produce not a single scrap of positive evidence to prove her claims;
all she can do is systematically to deny the evidence that is there.” Questioning the evidentiary value of existing
documentation is not the same thing as denying that documentation. It is true: I cannot prove that the man from
Stratford was not the writer the title pages proclaim him to be, because one cannot prove a negative. However,
I do demonstrate why there is an overwhelming probability that he did not write the works that have come
down to us under his name. If he wrote the plays and poems, he would have left behind a few scraps of evidence to
show that he did it, as did the two dozen other writers I investigated.

It is regrettable that Prof. Wells characterizes my book as an attempt to “destroy the Shakespearian case.” My book is
an attempt to revisit the evidence and to reconstruct Shakespeare’s biography based on the evidence. Finally, I do
not claim that my biography is “definitive.” But I think it is a step in the right direction.

In their blog reply to my response to the Blogging Shakespeare 8 May 2013 review of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem
(“Beyond Doubt For all Time,”
13 May 2013), Professors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson acknowledge that writers from the time period are documented to varying degrees, some more, some less.
They imply that Shakespeare is in
the “some less” category, so there are no grounds for suspicion. As Wells puts it, “The fact that some leave fuller records
than others does not invalidate the records of those with a lower score.”
Based on surviving evidence that supports his activities as a writer, Shakespeare not only rates a “lower score,” he rates a score of zero.
At the time of his death, Shakespeare left behind over 70 documents, including some that tell us what he did professionally.
Yet none of those 70+ documents support the statement that he was a
writer. From a statistical standpoint, this is an untenable position, as I have argued elsewhere:

Even the most poorly documented writers, those with less than a dozen records in total, still left behind a couple of personal
literary paper trails. Based on the average proportions, I would conservatively have expected perhaps a third of Shakespeare’s
records, or about two dozen, to shed light on his professional activities. In fact, over half of them, forty-five to be precise,
are personal professional paper trails, but they are all evidence of non-literary professions: those of actor, theatrical shareholder,
financier, real estate investor, grain-trader, money-lender, and entrepreneur. It is the absence of contemporary personal literary
paper trails that forces Shakespeare’s biographers to rely — to an unprecedented degree — on posthumous evidence.
(“Evidence For A Literary Biography,” in Tennessee Law Review, 147)

While Wells and Edmondson acknowledge that Shakespeare is the only writer from the time period for whom one must rely on posthumous
to make the case, Wells disputes my claim that Shakespeare left behind no evidence that he was a writer. The evidence he cites are
“the Stratford monument and epitaphs, along with Dugdale’s identification of the monument as a memorial to ‘Shakespeare the poet’,
Jonson’s elegy, and others” — all posthumous evidence.
On the distinction between contemporaneous and posthumous evidence or testimony, Wells states:

I do not agree (whatever ‘historians and critics’ may say) that posthumous evidence ‘does not carry the same weight as contemporaneous evidence.’
If we took that to its logical extreme we should not believe that anyone had ever died.”

But historians and biographers routinely cite documentary evidence (burial registers, autopsy reports, death notices, etc.)
to report that someone died. Wells may disagree with “whatever ‘historians and critics’ may say,” but I employ the criteria
applied by those “historians and critics” who distinguish between contemporaneous and posthumous testimony
(e.g., Richard D. Altick & John J. Fenstermaker, H. B. George, Robert D. Hume, Paul Murray Kendall, Harold Love, and Robert C. Williams).

Jonson’s eulogy and the rest of the First Folio testimony is posthumous by seven years, and it is the first in
print to identify Shakespeare of Stratford as the dramatist. Posthumous or not, this testimony therefore demands
close scrutiny. And I find in the First Folio front matter numerous misleading statements, ambiguities, and outright
contradictions. I am not alone. For example, concerning the two introductory epistles, Gary Taylor expresses caution
about taking the “ambiguous oracles of the First Folio” at face value (Wells et al., Textual Companion, 18).
Cumulatively, the misleading, ambiguous, and contradictory statements render the First Folio testimony, including
the attribution to Shakespeare of Stratford, vulnerable to question.

From my earlier response:

Wells concludes that “of course, she can produce not a single scrap of positive evidence to prove her
claims; all she can do is systematically to deny the evidence that is there.” Questioning the evidentiary value of existing
documentation is not the same thing as denying that documentation. It is true: I cannot prove that the man from Stratford was
not the writer the title pages proclaim him to be, because one cannot prove a negative.

Prof. Wells now counters that:

Price defends her attitude by saying ‘one cannot prove a negative case.’ Why not? It is surely possible to
prove that for example Queen Elizabeth 1 was not alive in 1604 or that Sir Philip Sidney did not write King Lear or
that Professor Price does not believe that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Shakespeare.

There is affirmative evidence that Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Even allowing for uncertainties in traditional chronology,
King Lear was written years after Sidney died in 1586. David Hackett Fischer elaborates on the logical fallacy
of “proving” a negative when no affirmative evidence exists (Historians’ Fallacies, 1970, p. 62),
and it is in that sense that I state that “one cannot prove a negative.” If there were explicit affirmative
evidence that Shakespeare wrote for a living, there could be no authorship debate.

Please note: I am not a professor.

Bibliography

Centerwall, Brandon S. “Who Wrote William Basse’s ‘Elegy on Shakespeare’?: Rediscovering A Poem Lost From the Donne Canon”Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006).

Radio National Perspective,
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (by Prof. Patrick
Buckridge, 25 March 2002). “At the core of Price’s book is a demonstration of just how
exceptional Shakespeare’s case really is in comparison with his contemporaries in the theatre. …
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography
was published by Greenwood Press, a respected American publisher, in their academic series, “Contributions
in Drama and Theatre Studies.” This in itself is a remarkable breakthrough for a viewpoint that has hitherto been
strictly quarantined to that part of the book market where wacky theories about the secrets of the Pyramids
or the secret sex life of Billy the Kid are canvassed freely and with no impact at all on serious scholarship.
It remains to be seen whether the book gets the serious attention it deserves.”

Shakespeare Bulletin (by Prof. Daniel L. Wright, winter 2002).
“Price’s text revisits the
terrain of the Shakespeare authorship problem and sweeps away the detritus of conjecture.
In doing so, she clarifies our understanding of why some of the problems
related to Shakespeare are so vexing, contententious, and fascinating.”

History Today (August 2001). The cover story, “Who Wrote
Shakespeare?” by Prof. William Rubinstein, examines the authorship
controversy and suggests five books, including
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography for further reading.

Prof. Alan Nelson at
his website
(3/01): “Diana Price knows how to put a
sentence together, but she does not know how to put an argument
together without engaging in special pleading: that is, taking
evidence that has an apparent signification, and arguing with all
her might that it does not fit the special case of William
Shakespeare for this or that special - and wholly arbitrary -
reason.” For the author’s response, click on Nelson.

Prof. Alan Nelson replied to my rebuttal on his website at
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/: “Leonard Digges composed a handwritten
inscription directly concerning William Shakespeare and directly touching on literary
matters. … So close was Digges himself to Shakespeare that he called him not “Shakespeare,"
“William Shakespeare,” or “Mr. Shakespeare,” but - with singular affection and using his
nick-name - “our Will Shakespeare". … “our” is simply the plural of “my",
entirely appropriate in a literary discussion among three close friends, Will Baker, James Mabbe, and Leonard Digges.”
For the author’s response, click on
Response to Prof. Alan Nelson.

David Kathman, co-author with Terry Ross of The Shakespeare Authorship Website,
contributed comments to “Shaksper,” the on-line
orthodox discussion group, moderated by Prof. Hardy Cook: “Price’s book presents a superficial appearance of scholarship which may
fool those not trained in the field, but in many ways this makes it more
dangerous than the more obviously wacko anti-Stratfordian tomes which
litter bookstore shelves.” Although Mr. Kathman
explained that “Terry Ross and I have both been far too busy with more important matters
to write up a comprehensive response to Price (doing exciting real
scholarship is somehow much more fulfilling than refuting
pseudo-scholarship),” he endorsed a lengthy review by Tom Veal (a much expanded version
of his review on Amazon.com). Kathman directed “Shaksper"
subscribers to Veal’s review, “which points
out just some of its multitudinous faults.” Many of Veal’s
criticisms are already addressed elsewhere on this website.
For additional material on his criticism concerning the Sir Thomas More manuscript, click on More
and page forward to pages 127-133.

One of Veal’s
major criticisms is that I cite the Tudor “stigma of
print” to explain why an arisotcratic playwright would
need to conceal his identity. Veal cites The Shakespeare
Authorship Page, which contends that the “stigma of
print” is a myth. For the author’s response, click on
Stigma of Print.

The Tudor stigma of
print is a factor in my discussion of Shakespeare’s authorship. I
discuss the matter in chapter 12 to explain why an aristocratic
author would wish to conceal his or her identity, either in
anonymity or behind a pen name. This essay responds to those critics
who challenge the very existence of a Tudor “stigma of print” and
further assert that my alleged failure to support my claims with
adequate evidence is symptomatic of slipshod scholarship.

It is my perception
that Tudor aristocrats did not wish to be perceived as interested in
earning money for professional work. That was the province of the
commercial class, and earning money by writing was viewed as
professional activity. The stigma of print therefore affected what
the aristocrat wrote and whether it was published.

Tudor England was still largely a
manuscript culture, and “the recognized medium of communication was
the manuscript, either in the autograph of the author, or in the
transcription of a friend” (Marotti, Donne, 4). The
transmission of manuscript into print was influenced by a
socially-imposed stigma of print which affected some genres
much more than others. It had less effect, for example, on the
publication of pious or didactic works, learned translations,
historical treatises, or the like. Such educational or devotional
tracts had no taint of commercialism.

More to the point here, any nobleman good enough to write
professionally could not be seen to be doing so.
I argue that in the social
caste system of Tudor England, aristocrats chose not to publish
certain genres considered
commercial, such as satires, broadsides,
or plays written for the public stage, or frivolous genres,
such as poetry. Some of these distinctions are covered in chapter
12, where I cite the evidence concerning the dramatic writing of the
earls of Derby and Oxford. This essay is to augment the evidence in
that chapter and respond to recent criticism.

David Kathman and
Terry Ross, authors of The Shakespeare Authorship Home Page,
propose that the stigma of print is an anti-Stratfordian fantasy. As
far as I can tell, their challenge relies entirely upon a 1980
article by Stephen May, Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print,"
which is reproduced on the website with accompanying commentary:

As May demonstrates, “Tudor aristocrats published regularly.” The “stigma
of print” is a myth. May does concede that there was for a time a
“stigma of verse” among the early Tudor aristocrats, “but even this
inhibition dissolved during the reign of Elizabeth until anyone, of
whatever exalted standing in society, might issue a sonnet or play
without fear of losing status.” This essay first appeared in
Renaissance Papers. (Kathman & Ross)

More recently, in a
review on Amazon and on his own website, Tom Veal has attempted to
provide some more meat on the bone, although his reliance on
The Shakespeare Authorship Home Page is evident. In his dismissal of
my scholarship, David Kathman recommended Veal’s criticism to the
orthodox discussion group, “Shaksper” (Feb. 8, 2002):

I hope you’ll allow me to direct SHAKSPER
readers to a lengthy review of Ms. Price’s book which points out
just some of its multitudinous faults:

Terry Ross and I have both been far too busy
with more important matters to write up a comprehensive response to
Price (doing exciting real scholarship is somehow much more
fulfilling than refuting pseudo-scholarship), but last year Terry
wrote up some rather lengthy responses to specific points and posted
them at humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare. [links via Google; see
Bibliography below]

Price’s book presents a superficial appearance of scholarship which may fool
those not trained in the field, but in many ways this makes it more
dangerous than the more obviously wacko anti-Stratfordian tomes
which litter bookstore shelves. See the above review and posts for a
small fraction of the problems with it.

Following Kathman’s
endorsement of Veal’s review, I decided to begin to respond to major
points of criticism, and the allegedly “mythical” stigma of print
seemed a good place to start.

I disagree with Prof.
May’s conclusion for several reasons. One, the very evidence that he
cites to demonstrate why the “myth” of the stigma of print was first
postulated is, in my view, evidence of a genuine social dynamic.
Among that evidence is The Arte of English Poesie (1589):

Now also of such
among the Nobilities or gentrie as to be very well seene in many
laudable sciences, and especially in making or poesie, it is so come
to passe that they have no courage to write, & , if they have,
yet are loath to be a knowen of their skill., So as I know very many
notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and
suppressed it agayne, or els suffred it to be publisht without their
owne names to it: as if it were a discredit for a Gentleman to seeme
learned and to show him selfe amorous of any good Art.
(Elizabethan Critical Essays :2:22).

And in her Maiesties
time that now is are sprong up an other crew of Courtly makers,
Noble men and Gentlemen of her Maiesties owne servaunts, who have
written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could
be found out and made publicke with the rest; of which number is
first that noble Gentleman Edward Earle of Oxford.
Thomas Lord of Bukhurst, when he was young, Henry Lord
Paget, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Rawleigh, Master
Edward Dyar, Maister Fulke Grevell, Gascon,
Britton, Turberuille and a great many other learned
Gentlemen, whose names I do not omit for envie, but to avoyde
tediousneffe, and who have deserved no little commendation.
(Elizabethan Critical Essays :2:63-64).

The stigma of print, as
discussed here, especially applies to verse. It is worth noting that
the author of The Arte of English Poesie chose to remain
anonymous himself.

May concludes that
there was a “stigma of verse” but no general “stigma of print.” I would
infer, then, that the stigma of print, such as it was, was confined
to the genre of poetry. By extension, other genres,
regardless of worth or respectability (including plays, whether
verse or prose), must have remained unaffected. But that scenario
does not, in my view, sufficiently distinguish between either social
class or genre, nor does it explain the absence of creative
works published by the nobility.

George Pettie offers
testimony to a general reluctance of the Tudor gentleman to betray
his learning by writing and publishing anything, even serious
matter, and his statements support the existence of a stigma of
print. Pettie adopts some typical poses to explain his own
appearance in print:

A Petite Palace is prefaced by three letters that fictitiously describe
how it came to press against the will of its author. In the first,
“To the Gentle Gentlewoman Readers,” one “R. B.” recounts his role
in the “faithless enterprise,” claiming that he named the work after
Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. Having heard Pettie give the
stories “in a manner ex tempore ” on many “private occasions"
and having learned that he had then written them down, R. B.
apparently begged the manuscript from his friend, promising to keep
it for private use. But fervent admiration for the opposite sex
drove R. B. to “transgress the bounds of faithful friendship” and
publish the stories for the “common profit and pleasure” of readers
“whom by my will I would have only gentlewomen.

In the second
prefatory letter -- supposed to have accompanied the manuscript when
Pettie confided it to his treacherous friend -- Pettie asks R. B. to
keep the manuscript secret because “divers discourses touch nearly
divers of my near friends.” The third letter is from the printer,
who claims to know neither Pettie nor R. B. but to have been given
the manuscript by a third party. Alarmed by the “too wanton” nature
of the work, the printer then “gelded” it of “such matters as may
seem offensive.” Authorial disavowal of an intention to publish was
not uncommon in the late sixteenth century; such a stance represents
an attempt to circumvent the class derogation attached to print. But
Pettie’s second work, The Civil Conversation, maintains the
fiction that his first was published without his permission.”
(Juliet Fleming,
Dictionary of Literary Biography 136:
Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers
. Ed. David A.
Richardson. The Gale Group, 1994.)

In Pettie’s preface
to his translation of The Civile Conversation, we read
further:

“a trifling woorke of mine [Pettie Palace ] (which by reason of
the lightnesse of it, or at the least of the keeper of it, flewe
abroade before I knewe of it). … I thought it stood mee upon, to
purchase to my selfe some better fame by some better worke, and to
countervayle my former Vanitie, with some formal gravitie. …for the
men which wyll assayle me, are in deede rather to be counted
friendly foes, then deadly enemies, as those who wyll neyther
mislyke with me, nor with the matter which I shall present unto
them, but tendryng, as it were, my credite, thynke it convenient
that such as I am (whose profession should chiefly be armes) should
eyther spende the tyme writing Bookes, or publyshe them being
written. Those which mislyke studie or learning in Gentlemen, are
some fresh water Souldiers, who thynke that in warre it is the body
which only must beare the brunt of all, now knowyng that the body is
ruled by the minde, and that in all doubtfull and daungerour
matters: but having shewed els where how necessarie learning is for
Souldiers, I ad only, that if we in England shall frame our selves
only for warre, yf we be not very well Oyled, we shall hardly keepe
our selves from rusting, with such long continuance of peace. …
Those which myslike that a Gentleman should publish the fruites of
his learning, are some curious Gentlemen, who thynke it most
commendable in a Gentleman, to cloake his arte and skill in every
thing, and to seeme to doo all things of his owne mother witte as it
were: … they wyll at the seconde woorde make protestation that they
are no Schollers: whereas notwithstanding they have spent all theyr
time in studie. Why Gentlemen is it a shame to shewe to be that,
which it is a shame not to be? In divers thynges, nothynge to good
as Learning.

Pettie defends the
idea of publishing serious work, although he explains that he is
publishing Civile Conversations to make up for the triviality
of Pettie Palace. There is of course no reason for Pettie to
recite such an exercise if there was no stigma attached to
publishing in the first place.

Pettie’s words also suggest perceived
distinctions between serious and not-so-serious genres. May cites numerous
publications to demonstrate the non-stigma of print, but most of
these works could not be characterized either as frivolous or as
commercial. Some even include apologies for poetry (such as Sir John
Harington, who writes in the preface to his translation of Ariosto: “Some grave men
misliked that I should spend so much good time on such a trifling
worke as they deemed a Poeme to be” (
Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:219). According to McClure, Harington “despised the professional
man of letters. … In an age when the writing of verse was a gentleman’s
pastime, he employed his talents for the entertainment of himself
and his friends": “I near desearvd that gloriows name of
Poet; / No Maker I … / Let others Muses fayn; / Myne never sought to
set to sale her writing” (Epigrams, 34). (Note also
that when his translation was first published, Harington had no title.)

Creative poems were
considered literary trifles or frivolous toys, which accounts for
the reluctance to be seen writing poetry as a full-time occupation.
In contrast translations and closet dramas were educational and
suitable for study. But plays written for the public stage were
worse than frivolous. They were commercial, and public theater
itself was often viewed as downright disreputable. Nevertheless, if
there was no stigma of print, or if any authorial shyness was just
an affectation, then we should expect to identify various members of
the nobility who published their poems and plays, with or without
apology.

On the other hand, if
there was a stigma of print, we should expect to find some
sort of correlation between social rank, genre, and
publishing, i.e., the higher the social rank of the author, the more
reluctance to publish; and the more frivolous or commercial the
genre, the more reluctant the author. According to Arthur
Marotti, “literary communication was socially positioned and
socially mediated: styles and genres were arranged in hierarchies
homologous with those of rank, class, and prestige” (Marotti,
“Patronage,” 1). One would therefore expect to see the effect of the
stigma of print on something of a
sliding scale, having even an exponential effect on publishing as we climb
the social ladder. At the top end, we should expect find very few,
if any, of the nobility choosing to publish anything. Of those few
books that might be published with authorization, the
genre should be serious, educational, political, or
devotional. Then, as we descend the social ladder, we
should expect less serious genres to appear, with or without
authorization, or with apology. And when at last we find
self-proclaimed poets or dramatists (or satirists or fiction
writers) freely and openly publishing their creative work, we should
be looking at the lowest rungs of the gentry and the commoners, the
would-be’s, the aspiring amateurs, the professionals affecting
the conduct of the gentleman-amateur. And that is exactly what we
find.

Many members on the
top rungs of the Tudor aristocracy had outstanding reputations as
poets. But none of them published their creative work. The
earl of Surrey’s attributed poems were published in
miscellanies after his death. So were Thomas, [Baron] Lord Vaux’s.
The earl ofOxford published nothing
during his lifetime. Further down the social ladder were
Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Edward Dyer,
and Sir Fulke Greville, all of whom also earned
reputations as writers. None of them published their work, either.
Like those of their social betters, the relatively few poems that
appeared in print turned up in miscellanies. So here we have just
what we should expect if there were a stigma of print. All these
poets established literary reputations either on works transmitted
orally, circulated in manuscript, or in miscellanies published by
someone with access to those circulating manuscripts. It is not
until one descends to the aspiring gentlemen, the would-be’s, those
seeking preferment, and of course the newly emerging class of
professionals (e.g., Greene and Nashe) that one finds unrestrained
(and even then often apologetic) efforts to publish.

May acknowledges that
“To all appearances the code [of the stigma] was upheld by the next
generation of courtier poets, insofar as Sidney, Dyer, Ralegh, and
the earl of Essex, among the more prominent Elizabethan courtiers,
likewise made no provision to publish their works.” But it is that
appearance of conformity to the social code -- that very failure to
publish -- by the highest-ranking poets of reputation in Elizabethan
and Stuart England that demonstrates the stigma of print. The stigma
of print is manifested first and foremost with the nobility, and is
gradually diluted as we descend the social ladder. The members of
the nobility in Tudor and early Stuart England are relatively few in number,
and their ventures into publishing almost nil.

Most of the plays written by aristocrats
were closet dramas, not intended to be performed, and more properly
categorized as learned translations or political treatises. Even so,
nearly all the closet dramas that were published were either
unauthorized or were printed posthumously.
The Countess of Pembroke was the highest ranking aristocrat who
published a (possibly authorized) play, and it was closet drama. The
earl of Derby wrote plays for common players, but none
survive, at least not under his own name. If other aristocrats wrote
plays for the public stage, history does not record what those plays
were, and none were published with attribution. William Alexander
was a Scot and had no title when he published his four
closet dramas. Greville recorded his reluctance to see any of
his plays published, even posthumously.

Many of the works May
cites to deny a stigma of print are political, pious, or didactic
works and translations, which, as we move down the social ladder,
were published with less restraint and, even so, often with apology
by the upper classes. And those aristocrats (e.g., Oxford or
Raleigh) who contributed prefatory material to other men’s work were
appearing in the role of patron, which did not constitute a social
breach.

May concludes that
“the substantial number of upper-class authors who published during
the sixteenth century effectively discredits any notion of a
generally accepted code which forbade publication, since noblemen
and knights, courtiers and royalty, trafficked with the press in
ever-increasing numbers.” But this is contradicted not only by
Pettie’s testimony but also by the publishing record. No member of
the Tudor nobility published poetry, plays, satires, or the like.
May’s examples include authors from the Caroline period (e.g., the
Cavendishes or Fanshawe), too late to be relevant to the period. He
also lumps the top rungs of the aristocracy in with the middle and
lower gentry and even those yet to receive their title. The only
verse pamphlet by Sir John Beaumont was published when he was less
than 20 years old, and he did not become a “Sir” until just before
he died. Thomas Sackville had no title when Gorboduc was
published.

Finally, we have the
testimony of dozens of untitled writers who aspired to the code of
the gentlemen-amateurs, who wished to wash the money and printer’s ink off
their hands. Ca. 1603, Samuel Daniel wrote:

About a year
since, upon the great reproach given to the Professors of Rime and
the use thereof, I wrote a private letter, as a defense of mine owne
undertakings in that kinde, to a learned Gentleman, a great friend
of mine, then in Court. Which I did rather to confirm my selfe in
mine owne courses, and to hold him from being wonne from us, then
with any desire to publish the same to the world"
(A Defense of Rhyme, in Elizabethan Critical Essays :2:357).

Here we see Daniel
posturing to emulate the code of the aristocracy. Like Daniel,
numerous writers apologized for publishing their work, and since
there is an absence of published work by the top-ranking
aristocrats, I conclude that these apologies were not entirely
affectations.

I now wish to relate all this to Veal’s specific criticism, which relies heavily on
Kathman and Ross’s web page. Following is the section of Veal’s
review relevant to the “stigma of print":

As in other anti-Stratfordian works, the
“stigma of print” looms large in Miss Price’s picture of Elizabethan
society. It is vital to her position, because it furnishes her sole
explanation of why the real Shakespeare hid his
authorship.

Elizabethan gentlemen wrote for others in
their social circle with no thought of seeing their compositions in
print. Custom prohibited the upper class gentleman from having any
profession at all, writing included. To publish for public
consumption was the business of the paid professional, not the
gentleman. [218]

The “stigma” theory, devised in the 19th
Century to explain why so few Tudor aristocrats published their
works, has fallen out of favor for the simple reason that the
phenomenon that it sought to explain did not really exist. As Steven
May, the leading authority on Elizabethan courtier poets, has
demonstrated, those Elizabethan gentlemen who wrote at all (a small
minority) published quite a bit and were not disgraced thereby. Miss
Price ignores Professor May’s article in her book, though she claims
on her website to have read it (one of many instances in which she
deals with uncongenial analysis by averting her eyes). More
importantly, she makes no effort to examine the directly pertinent
question: Would an Elizabethan or Jacobean courtier who wrote plays
have had any strong motive to hide his authorship?

The case for a “stigma” is much weakened by the
fact that persons of high station did in fact write, or attempt to
write, for the theater. Sir Thomas Sackville, a cousin of the Queen
and later a baron and earl, co-authored Gorboduc, the first
noteworthy Elizabethan tragedy. It was printed under his name in
about 1570, evidently from a manuscript that he supplied. Two plays
by William Cavendish, earl of Newcastle, were presented at
Blackfriars, London’s most popular theater, in the early 1640’s.
Manuscripts, dated about 1600, survive of several dramas written by
Lord William Percy, a younger son of the earl of Northumberland, for
production by the Children of Paul’s. Noble authors whose works
never, so far as we know, reached the stage include Fulk Greville,
Lord Brooke, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (translator of a
blood-and-thunder French tragedy) and William Alexander, earl of
Stirling. Many of these pieces are conventionally labeled “closet
dramas", but, unlike Goethe’s Faust or Hardy’s The Dynasts,
they are not unactable epics or novels in dialogue.
Their form and structure differ not at all from popular
drama.

The “stigma of print"
in Tudor England was not “devised” in the 19th century.
According to May, it was Edward Arber who first wrote about the
Tudor stigma of print, but then Arber is merely the first to have
noticed< the phenomenon. Far from having fallen out of
fashion, the “stigma of print” remains an integral part of literary
studies today.

The landmark study on
this subject is J.W. Saunders’s 1951 essay “The Stigma of Print.” I
also refer to his related article, “From Manuscript to Print,” and
The Profession of English Letters. According to Saunders, the
professional poet had “his eye on personal profit,” whereas the
gentleman-amateur “attempted to keep poetry within private genteel
circles and attached to appearance in print a formidable social
stigma ("Stigma,” 155; “Manuscript,” 509). Saunders considered some
of the mystifications that cloaked the well-born author in print, as
well as some of the apologies and disclaimers that appeared when a
work escaped into print: “Underlying many of the quotations … is a
certain moral hesitation about the value of the imaginative literary
arts, lyric poetry, drama, and so on, in which the Court excelled"
(Profession, 60), so here Saunders touches on the frivolous
nature of poetry, fiction, and drama.

Many Tudor gentlemen
describe writing poetry as vain or foolish (e.g., Spenser’s “ydle
rimes … The labor of lost time” (FQ, verse to Burghley); or
Thomas Blenergasset’s “learned men, yet none which spende their tyme
so vainely as in Poetrie” (Mirrour for Magistrates, cit. by Saunders, “Manuscript,” 512).
According to Richard Helgerson, “as a
plaything of youth, a pastime for idle hours, poetry might be
allowed. … But as an end in itself, as the main activity of a man’s
life, poetry had no place. … For the courtier, poetry could be only
an avocation, never a vocation” ("Role,” 550). Pettie articulated
this value in the preface cited above. It is this value system that
underlies the aristocrat’s reluctance to be published.
Helgerson also notes that while “the amateurs
avoided print; the laureates sought it out.” He views Sidney as
“that most nearly laureate of amateur poets” ("Laureate,” 201, 202),
and of course, Sidney published none of his work during his
lifetime.

Concerning characteristics common to both poetry and drama, Helgerson writes
elsewhere:

If playwriting could so easily be made to
occupy the place more commonly taken in an amateur career by
verse-making, it was because both were supposed to be equally
frivolous. Neither private verse nor public drama made the claim to
literary greatness that distinguishes the laureate and his work. The
courtly amateur claimed to write only for his own amusement and that
of his friends; the professional, for money and the entertainment of
the paying audience (“Laureate,” 206).

Helgerson has
described two principal factors behind the stigma of publishing
plays written for the public theaters; they were perceived as
commercial and frivolous.

Among other
20th century authorities who have incorporated the
concept of the stigma of print into their studies are:

F.B. Williams, who writes that “the death of
Sir John Harington in November, 1612, removed the courtly taboo
against the publication of his epigrams, which had gained wide
repute in manuscript “("Feathers,” 1,021).

Hyder Edward Rollins, who notes the while “more impressive names, more
really fine poets, were connected with The Phoenix Nest
than with any previous anthology, … not a single author is
definitely named. … In those days, to have made a parade of one’s
poetical compositions [i.e., in print] would have been vulgar"
(Phoenix, xvi).

Arthur Marotti, who writes that “Gentlemen-amateurs avoided what J.W.
Saunders has called the “stigma of print” by refusing to publish
their verse, publishing it anonymously, or (accurately or
inaccurately) disclaiming responsibility for its appearance in
book form” (Donne, 3).

David Riggs, who writes that “Gentleman still regarded poetry as a form
of elegant recreation. They wrote for themselves, or circulated
their poems in manuscript among their friends, but shunned the
medium of print” (Jonson, 228).

Robert Lacey, who writes that Raleigh and his friends “wrote their poems
for private circulation, not for publication … It was considered
most infra dig [beneath
one’s dignity] for a gentleman to allow what he wrote to be
distributed through commercial publication” (Raleigh, 130).

Richard Dutton, who writes that “Another
notable aristocratic mark was the aversion to print, with its
connotations of artisan labor and writing for money” (“Birth,” 88).

The editors of works of the Countess of Pembroke, who propose that one
reason so little of her work survives “may have been her
reluctance to put her original works into print, despite her
boldness in printing her translations under own name. … The stigma
of print was, as Harold Love observes, ’particularly hard on women
writers.’ … Manuscript circulation was the preferred form of
circulation” (Hannay, 54).

These citations
demonstrate that current scholarship accepts the stigma of print as
a genuine phenomenon. However, the above cited authorities generally
discuss the stigma in connection with poetry (but occasionally prose
or drama). Let us now consider the works of aristocratic dramatists.

Veal claims that the
aristocratic plays that were published in Tudor or Stuart England
“are conventionally labeled ’closet dramas’ [but] … they are not
unactable epics or novels in dialogue. Their form and structure
differ not at all from popular drama.” Closet drama is not intended
for performance, but it is not the actability of the plays
that is at issue. It is the question of whether the aristocrat wrote
plays to be performed on the public stage and published them
with attribution. The purpose, the intended audience, and the venue
are all of concern.

So, let us consider
the published works that, according to Veal, demonstrate that there
was no stigma of print. To arrive at a judgment, at least two
factors need to be examined, (1) genre, and (2) circumstances
of publication, including irregularities, signs of piracy or
unauthorized publication, disclaimers, and so on.

Thomas Sackville : Gorboduc

Sackville (1536-1608)
was son of Sir Richard Sackville, became Lord Buckhurst in 1567, and
the earl of Dorset in 1604. Gorboduc was acted in 1562 at the
Inner Temple, published in 1565, and reprinted in 1570 and 1590. At
the time of publication, Sackville had no title, so its publication
is irrelevant to the discussion.

Nevertheless, the
1565 edition was pirated (see Chambers, Stage 3:457 or Brooks,
Printing, 30-31). According to the title page of the 1570
edition, the play was “written about nine years ago by the right
honorable now Lord Buckhurst, and by T. Norton,” “was never intended
by the authors thereof to be published,” and the original publisher
obtained the play from “some yongmans hand that lacked a little
money and much discretion.” There’s the disclaimer that demonstrates
the stigma of print, in this case invoked perhaps since by 1570 one
of its authors did have a title.

William Cavendish

Cavendish (1592-1676), the earl of
Newcastle’s plays from the 1640s are too late to be relevant to the
discussion.

Lord William Percy

Percy (1575-1648) was
the third son of the 8th earl
of Northumberland.
The surviving plays in question are
preserved in manuscripts that bear the initials “W.P., Esq.”
According to Chambers (Stage, 3:464-65), Percy’s
“authorship appears to be fixed by a correspondence between an
epigram in the MS. to Charles Fitzgeffry with one Ad Gulielmum Percium in Fitzgeoffridi Affaniae
(1601).” It is not know if they were ever performed at St. Paul’s,
but it is certain that they were never printed during the author’s
lifetime. The first play was not printed until 1824. Percy’s plays
therefore cannot be cited to dispute the stigma of print.

Sir Fulke Greville : Mustapha

Greville (1554-1828)
was knighted in 1603 and created Baron Brooke in 1621.
Mustapha is a closet drama (May, Courtier, 167).
According to M.E. Lamb, Mustapha is “overtly
political in purpose and show[s] more concern in reforming the state
than the stage” (“Myth,” 201). In the Dictionary of Literary Biography,
Charles Larson writes:

Always the
gentleman amateur, Greville never permitted any of his writings to
be published while he was alive, and it was probably a considerable
annoyance to him when an unauthorized printing of Mustapha
appeared in 1609. His was not a drama written for the popular
theater, and, indeed, he claimed in the Life of Sidney never
to have had any intention of having his plays staged under any
circumstances: “I have made these Tragedies, no Plaies for the
Stage…. But he that will behold these Acts upon their true Stage,
let him look on that Stage wherein himself is an Actor, even the
state he lives in, and for every part he may perchance find a
Player, and for every Line (it may be) an instance of life.” This is
one of the most explicit statements extant on the theory of
Elizabethan closet drama, and it is important to put a positive face
on it: Greville most certainly does approve of drama as a literary
form. Staged plays might be merely entertainment and thus the fit
recipients of the attacks that the Puritans were waging against the
theater at that moment, but the drama as a literary text engages the
mind seriously and leads to important discoveries about the nature
of life.

In particular,
Greville “had difficulty writing ideological drama that is credible
as dramatic literature. Of course, one should recall that he did not
intend these plays for the stage" (Larson, DLB).

Mustapha was published
without attribution. Even May describes the edition of Mustapha as “surreptitious"
(Courtier, 325). Greville’s own surviving papers tell us explicitly about his
ambivalence and reluctance to have any of his works published, even
posthumously: “These pamphlets [i.e., his plays] which having slept
out my own time, if they happen to be seene herafter, shall at their
own peril rise upon the stage when I am not.”

Mary Sidney Herbert : Antonie

Mary (1561-1621),
countess of Pembroke, was Sir Philip Sidney’s sister and a
distinguished member of the nobility. According to the editors of
her Works, the countess’s
translation of Garnier’s
Marc Antoine “emphasized political commentary” (Hannay, 38). It is
classified as a “closet drama” (May, Courtier, 167), and
“with its discussion of moral issues presented in set speeches
rather than stage action, the genre would have been
particularly suited to reading aloud by the assembled guests at an
English country house like Wilson. Marc Antoine was
successfully staged in France; however, there is no record that
Pembroke’s translation was ever performed, even at Wilton” (Hannay,
41; see also Bergeron, “Women,” 70). Further, “the genre was also particularly
suited for women who desired to write plays but would not be
permitted to write for the public arena” (Hannay, 41).

Hannay et al.
assume the countess authorized publication of her translation. May
cautiously states that “the countess probably [emphasis
added] authorized the publication of Antonie because it
illustrated the precepts of dramatic tragedy formulated in [her
brother’s] Defense … and
asserted that a good ruler seeks to be loved rather than feared by
his subjects” (May, Courtier, 167).

William Alexander : The Monarchicke Tragedies

William Alexander
(1567-1640) was tutor to Prince Henry and came down to London from
Scotland when James acceded the throne. He was raised to the rank of
viscount in 1630 and to the earldom in 1633. His four historical
tragedies on classical subjects, Darius, Alexander, Caesar, and
Croesus, were first published at the beginning of James I’s reign
and issued collectively as The Monarchicke Tragedies.

Alexander’s four tragedies are closet dramas. The only entry for him in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography appears, significantly, in the volume of
17th century British Nondramatic [emphasis
added] Poets. Beckett writes that “The plays in
The Monarchicke Tragedies
were never intended for the stage, as its
dedication to King James makes clear. Each deals with the dangers of
ambition in a monarch, and each is both didactic and sententious.”
According to Lamb, “the grave political advice which fills his
cumbersome Monarchicke Tragedies, dedicated to the new English king, strongly suggest a
desire to establish himself as a wise counselor, not as a budding
playwright” ("Myth,” 200). The circumstances of publication are
straightforward, but at time of publication, he had no title. So
again, this is irrelevant to the stigma of print as it affected the
aristocracy.

Veal’s final
criticism:

Of crucial importance too was the attitude of
the monarch. Although plays were considered scarcely better than
pornography in Puritan circles, those were not the sentiments that
prevailed at the fons honoris. Elizabeth and James were
theatrical enthusiasts. The Queen saw six to ten plays in an average
season, the King twice as many.
Virtually all of those works
were drawn from the repertories that the leading professional
companies presented in London. Contrary to what Miss Price imagines
[264], there was, during the period of Shakespeare’s activity, no
special category of “court plays” distinct from the commercial
theater. There is, in short, no credible reason to think that a late
Tudor aristocrat would have suffered at all from being known as the
mind behind some of the most popular dramas of the day.

Veale must have
missed the distinction between writing plays for academic, private,
or royal venues, and being recognized as having written and published a
commercial play. In addition, it was one thing to patronize a play at court; it
was another to be seen as the author who wrote for public
consumption.

CONCLUSION

Although writing
closet drama was a respectable pastime, few aristocratic authors
published their dramas. The countess of Pembroke “probably"
authorized the publication of Antonie
, but the circumstances
remain unclear. Young master Percy’s plays were not published during
his lifetime. Alexander wrote his plays, not for the stage, but to
convince King James that he was fit to serve as a counselor to a
monarch, and at the time that he did publish, he was newly arrived
from Scotland and had no title. Gorboduc and Mustapha were printed
without authorization, and at the time of publication, Sackville had
no title.

In my book, I build
the case that the works of Shakespeare were written by an unnamed
nobleman, and that the stigma of print was a contributing factor to
the appearance of another man’s name on the works. Having
reconsidered the stigma of print in light of the criticism from
Mssrs. Veal and Kathman, I have no reason to amend anything on this
topic in my book. If the works of Shakespeare were written by an
aristocrat, then that aristocrat had good reason to conceal his
identity. In short, there is ample evidence to demonstrate the Tudor
“stigma of print.” Today, literary critics continue to incorporate
the phenomenon into their studies, and it remains a factor relevant
to the Shakespeare authorship question.

POSTSCRIPT: According
to Veal, “a bevy of gentlemen of rank
wrote the prefatory verses to Spenser’s Faerie Queene,
“but he has that back-to-front. Spenser addressed
prefatory verses to a bevy of aristocrats, not they to him.

p. 156: “the silence in the historic record” should read “the silence in the historical record"

Errata and additions (for the paperback edition of 2013)

p. 67:

The absence of “gent.” in the 1601 burial entry for John leads to speculation that
William passed himself off as newly armigerous, although technically, he would have been entitled to style himself a gentleman
only after his father had died (see Lewis, 1:212). John Shakspere was buried on 8 September 1601. William Shakspere was styled “gent”
in a deed for the Globe theatre property dated 7 October 1601.

Tom Reedy points out that son William was entitled to the honorific “Mr”
when father John’s application was approved, making the entry in the 23 August 1600 SR the first instance in which son William
styled himself “Mr.” I stand corrected. For a full response to Mr. Reedy concerning the implications this correction has for
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, click here.

On an e-discussion group,
David Kathman pointed out that Weever included only a
small portion of the contents of his notebook in his
1631 publication, that no epitaphs from Warwickshire
were included, so the omission of Shakspere’s
epitaphs is hardly “curious.” I stand
corrrected (see Honigmann, Weever, 63).

p. 162: In the epitaph,
“
With in this monuement Shakespeare” should read “With in this monument
Shakspeare.”

p. 189: I write that two references were made in the Shakespeare First Folio
to “moniment,” both times spelled with an “i,” and that the spelling of the word “moniment” (i.e. in the sense of records
or written work) signals the pun on “monument” (i.e., in the sense of a statue or memorial). In particular, Jonson’s line,
“thou art a moniment without a tomb,” suggests a double meaning. The line can mean that (1) Shakespeare is memorialized
by his body of work, not by a tomb -- witness Shakespeare’s own sonnet 81: “Your monument shall be my gentle verse”;
and (2) Shakspere’s Stratford monument was originally supposed to sit on top of the tomb itself, but since it does not,
it is a monument without a tomb.

Terry Ross has pointed out that the spelling
of the words “moniment” and “monument” were interchangeable in Shakespeare’s day,
so Ben Jonson’s pun on the word in his First Folio eulogy (“thou art
a moniment without a tomb) is not signaled by drawing attention to the letter “i.”
Jonson’s ambiguity therefore relies on the context, not the spelling.

p. 197: The sentence concerning Jonson’s denigration of Shakespeare’s source for
Comedy of Errors is in error. The following would replace that sentence: In his Conversations with Drummond,
Jonson referred to the plot device, specifically confusion and mistaken identity resulting from a double set of twins,
found in Plautus’s Amphitruo. Jonson rejected Amphitruo as a viable source for a play, because he did not
think the roles of the twins could be convincingly cast. While Shakespeare’s principal source for Comedy of Errors was
Plautus’s Menaechmi, Shakespeare was also indebted for part of his plotting to Amphitruo. Implicit in Jonson’s
rejection of Amphitruo as a viable source for a play is criticism of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. (Amphitruo
is a Roman, not a Greek play.)

p. 26: “Quandam [sundry]” should read “Quandam [former]”

p. 50: In the 5th line from the bottom, “addresses”
should read “addressees”

p. 203: In the marginal
note, “Ingeriorum” should read “Ingeniorum.”

p. 307: In the entry
for Harvey, #2 should read: letter to Sir Robert Cecil, referring
to “sundrie royale Cantos” being readied for
publication (Stern, Harvey, 51).

p. 310: In the entry
for Middleton, # 7 should read: “no evidence.” The
verse from Richards was published posthumously. (The
corresponding checkmark on p. 303 should be deleted.)

p. 310-11: In the entry
for Lyly, # 2 and #6 should read: “I may … write prayers instead of plays - prayers for
your long and prosperous life and a repentence that I have played
the fool so long” (1598 petition to the Queen,
Lyly, ed. Bond, 1:64-65).

p. 312: In the entry
for Watson, # 8 should read: “no evidence” Watson’s and Marlowe’s arrest
after a fracas sheds no light on a literary exchange. (The corresponding checkmark on p. 305 should be deleted.).

p. 308: In the entry
for Samuel Daniel, add to #3 (“paid to write”):
payment
to “Danyell the Poet” in the earl of Hertford’s
accounts (John Pitcher, “Samuel Daniel, the Hertfords, and A
Question of Love,” Review of English Studies 35 [1984],
449-462);
a corresponding checkmark can be
added to category #3 on p. 303.

p. 308: In the entry
for Samuel Daniel, add to #10 (“notice at death as a writer”):
letter dated 7 Feb. 1620
by William Alexander to William Drummond:
“am glad that you exercise your Muse, since Samuel Daniel is dead”; Daniel was
buried in October 1619 (William Drummond, The Works of William Drummond, Edinburgh, 1711,
p. 151);
a corresponding checkmark can be
added to category #10 on p. 303.

p. 308: In the entry for George Peele, add to #7 (“commendatory verse”:
“William Gager’s verses for Peele’s translation of Iphigenia, in which Gager acknowledges their friendship and
encourages “my Peele” (David H. Horne, The Life and Minor Works of George Peele. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952; 1:42-46); a corresponding checkmark can be added to category #7 on p. 303.

p. 308: In the entry
for George Peele, add to #9 (“evidence of books”):
“James Peele Clerke
is allowed bokes by order of the Gouv’nors for George his sonne who is in the Gram
Skole” (P.H. Cheffaud, George Peele ; Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1913;
p. 8 n);
a corresponding checkmark can be
added to category #9 on p. 303.

p. 310: In the entry
for John Marston, add to #2 (“record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters”):
letter to Sir Gervase Clifton concerning Marston’s masque, pleading his
“excuse for not yett sending the booke. First with my owne hand I wrott one coppye;
for all the rest which I hadd caused to be transcribed were given and stolne from me att my Lord Spencer’s.
Then with all suddeine care I gave my coppy unto a scrivener…” (W.H. Grattan Flood, “A John Marston Letter,"
Review of English Studies 4 [January 1928]: 86-87; see also Robert E. Brettle,
“The 'Poet Marston' Letter to Sir Gervase Clifton, 1607,” Review of English Studies 4 [April 1928]: 212-14);
a corresponding checkmark can be
added to category #2 on p. 303.

The De Vere Society newsletter (by Arthur Challinor, January 2001):
“One of the most impressive factors about this book is that it does not overreach.
Knowing that one will never overturn orthodox scholarship by argument which is
intellectually shoddy or suspect, she will not be led by the heart. … The challenge is
there and it is formidable. The breadth of the author’s research is impressive.”

Shakespeare Oxford Society newsletter (by Richard F. Whalen, fall 2000):
“Price declines to discuss who might be the true author of Shakespeare’s
works. … If Will Shakspere was not the author, then who was this aristocrat
she keeps mentioning?"

A reader (Craig T. Niedzielski from Hermosa, Bataan, Philippines) on
www.amazon.com (dead link)
(1/21/02): “For readers without preconceptions, Ms. Price provides a scrupulously
researched biography which does not, for once, depend upon page after page of “surely,"
“most probably,” and “almost certainly.” Reading a typical, orthodox biography is like
chomping down on a fluff of cotton candy: t’ain’t much there. This, by contrast, is
USDA Select Beef, with something to bite into and chew over on every page. Do not
let the premium price deter you. You get what you pay for, in this case a substantial work of scholarship.
For the still-hesitant prospective buyer, I strongly urge you to drop by Ms. Price’s website.
There you will find reviews and responses, errata and addenda, and most importantly get
a glimpse of the author’s ability to defend her work. Just type in the title slash
“author’s home page” and let your browser do the rest.
In sum, a very well-researched, very readable book that gets Shakespearean
scholarship off to a great start for the new millennium. My highest endorsement.”

A reader (from Los Angeles, CA) on
www.amazon.com (dead link)
(1/9/01): “Essential for those who wish to come to
grips with the Shakespearean authorship problem, first as an
exposition of the anti-Stratfordian case, and second as a
reference work of the first order…. Price offers the most
comprehensive biographical analysis to date….There is a fair
amount of strictly new evidence. Second, much of the evidence
compiled will be new to readers of orthodox biographies, where it
is either missing or distorted. Third, reexamination of “old"
evidence reveals overlooked matter. Fourth, the treatment of the
subject by prior scholarship is itself revealing evidence. Very
few persons will come away from a reading of Price’s book without
having learned much of its subject.”

A reader (Edward Thomas Veal) on
www.amazon.com
(11/29/00 and 1/18/01): This
“case against the Stratford man … amounts to
nothing more substantial than bile and overheated air.”
Further, in Part 2, “time and time again, Miss Price,
instead of seeking to refute inconvenient analyses, pretends that
they don’t exist. For the author’s response, click on Response to an Amazon.com reader review.
For additional material on his criticism concerning the Sir Thomas More manuscript,
click on More and scroll forward to pages 127-133.

Edward Thomas Veal has posted a lengthy review on his website.
Many of his criticsms are already addressed in responses elsewhere
on this website. For a response to his criticism concerning the “stigma of print,"
click on
Stigma of Print.

A reader (TMT from Wheeling, WV) on
www.amazon.com
(2/03/01): “I recommend you read it to see what the
fuss is all about.”

A reader (JT from Detroit, MI) on
www.amazon.com
(1/15/01): “A fine mystery, and some fine sleuthing
as well.”

A reader (from Santa Fe, NM) on
www.amazon.com
(1/13/01): “Readers who are passionately attached
to the traditional attribution will get nothing from this book
and will rail against it, and this book is not meant for them. It
is meant for open-minded readers who are willing to let go of
previous assumptions and received wisdom, and to look at old
evidence in a new light. I count myself among these…. This book
is the best presentation I’ve yet seen as to WHY it does not add
up.”

A reader (Ron Song Destro) on
www.amazon.com
(2/07/01): “Filled with new information and an
accurate analysis of the flaws found in traditional Shakespearean
scholarship. I recommend it heartily.”

A reader (Spotsmom) on
www.amazon.com
(11/11/00): “A learned and readable exposition of the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy.”

A reader (JMT) on Barnes and Noble
(11/21/00): An “easy-to-read and
well presented explanation of the role of William Shaksper in the
world of Elizabethan letters.”

Prof. Alan Nelson’s review is posted on
his website at socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/.
Following is the text of his review, with the author’s
response (indented and blue).

Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (2001)

Diana Price knows how to put a sentence together, but she does not know
how to put an argument together without engaging in
special pleading: that is, taking evidence that has an apparent
signification, and arguing with all her might that it does not
fit the special case of William Shakespeare for this or that
special - and wholly arbitrary - reason.

Take the fact that Ben Jonson writes a poem of dedication to the
“memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare”;
or the fact that Jonson reported that he had offended “the
Players” who thought he had insulted their “friend”
Shakespeare. Jonson explains, “I loved the man, and do honor
his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.”

Master William Shakespeare, whom Jonson also calls “Sweet Swan of
Avon,” associating him with Stratford upon Avon for any but
the wilfully deaf, is thus the recipient of a greater expression
of friendship than any contemporary author.

Price cannot of course accept this evidence, so she must find some way
to discredit it: such evidence is necessarily ironic, or satiric,
or deliberately misleading, or written after Shakespeare’s death:
note that there is always some reason why evidence does
not count in the case of William Shakespeare. Of course, one
could make up a set of special rules for any other author of the
period: why could there not have been two Edmund Spensers, one
real but stupid (since any evidence that he was a writer cannot
be allowed to count), another the pseudonym for some aristocrat?

Prof. Nelson apparently believes that I have
succeeded in establishing a set of rules that
somehow contrive to exclude all evidence proving
that Shakespeare’s vocation was writing,
while at the same time admitting such evidence
for any other alleged writers. His criticism is
perhaps more indicative of an entrenched faith in
Shakespeare’s biography than it is descriptive of
my methods of analysis.

I need not invent any arbitrary rules to admit or
disqualify literary evidence for Edmund Spenser. Despite
the fact that there were several Edmund Spensers in
Elizabethan England, there is no question about the poet
Edmund Spenser’s literary career. Spenser left behind
professional evidence of his occupation of writing, and
that evidence is explicit, unambiguous, and
contemporaneous; some of it is cited in the appendix in
my book. It is the absence of any
comparably explicit contemporaneous evidence for
Shakespeare that is unique to his biography.

If there is a case to be made for special pleading,
it is that routinely exercised by the orthodox biographer.
Biographers have made exceptions to their own rules in
order to admit, transmute, or create evidence for
Shakespeare to support his career as a playwright. In
order to do that, they have (page numbers are to my
book)

used impersonal evidence as personal evidence
(see p. 138)

used ambiguous evidence as explicit evidence (see
pp. 45-46)

used theatrical evidence as literary evidence
(see pp. 104-7)

attempted to invent evidence (click on More and page forward to pages 127-133.)

A close examination of the documentary evidence for
Shakspere [spelling chosen to indicate the man from
Stratford] shows that his literary biography relies on
posthumous evidence,
rather than on any solid
contemporaneous
evidence. In the genre of literary biographies for 1st, 2nd,
and 3rd string Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, that is
a unique phenomenon. In the course of his commentary on
my book, Prof. Nelson has himself engaged in special
pleading, by selectively departing from the standards
otherwise evident in the genre of literary biographies,
as I demonstrate below.

The argument which is most important to Price concerns the “literary
trail” which she thinks must necessarily have been
left by any author of the time … why she thinks so is never
fully explained.

Prof. Nelson must have missed some
introductory material in Chapter 1, including Gerald
Eades Bentley’s comments concerning “letters to or
from or about William Shakespeare” or “diaries
or accounts of his friends.” According to Bentley,
it is “personal material of this sort which provides
the foundation of most biographies” (Handbook,
4-5).

Prof. Nelson must have also missed the opening
paragraphs to Chapter 8, which read in part: “Biographers
construct their narratives around documentary evidence.
Some types of documentation are of a general character,
such as christening, marriage, or tax records. Such
records tell us that someone was born or paid taxes, but
they do not necessarily tell us about the person’s
profession. Other types of evidence, however, are
specific to a vocation or make incidental reference to an
occupation. … Shakspere’s biography is
presumably about a writer. … a man of letters may be
expected to leave behind personal records that reveal his
chosen vocation.”

That expectation turns out to be reasonable.
Each of the 24 other writers in the survey
did leave behind
such personal records that attest to their
vocation of writing. Shakspere is the only one
who did not.

She attaches ten categories to the trail, and rates each of many
authors “Yes” or blank … never “Possibly”
or “Probably.” To nobody’s surprise, Shakespeare
receives a blank in every category … but would you have
expected otherwise?

Yes, one would expect otherwise, IF Shakspere was
the writer we are told that he was. If I can find hard
documentary evidence for everyone else, why should
biographers need to make an exception for Shakspere, i.e.,
admit evidence that has to be qualified with a “possibly”
or a “maybe”? Shakespeare’s work was,
presumably, pre-eminent in its own time, and one should
therefore expect the author’s personal literary
paper trails to be up there, qualitatively speaking, with
others of the first rank, namely, Ben Jonson and Edmund
Spenser. He certainly should not be less well-documented
than, say, George Peele, John Webster, or John Fletcher.

The ten categories represent a subset of the larger
category of evidence which I define in my book as “personal
literary paper trails.” The goal of the analysis is
to test evidence that may support the fundamental
assumption that “he was a writer.” Therefore,
each piece of contemporaneous evidence is tested to
determine whether it is (a) personal, and (b) related to
literary activity and interests. If it satisfies both
tests, it qualifies as a personal literary paper trail.

Since I don’t have the patience to go into every tired but discredited
argument, every instance of special pleading, and every incorrect
statement or overlooked document in her book, I will simply give
my own answers to Price’s list of “paper-trail” topics:

1. Evidence of Education: Yes. Since his father was an
alderman and burgess of Stratford, Shakespeare would
certainly have attended the school at Stratford which was
given active support by the aldermen and burgesses of
Stratford for the education of their sons. On the other
hand, we know for a dead certainty that Shakespeare did
not attend the university (nor did Jonson): this is made
clear by the Cambridge Parnassus play of about
1600.

There is no evidence of
Shakspere’s education, and Prof. Nelson has not
cited any. Prof. Nelson apparently has not understood
that my comparative analysis is concerned with
documentary evidence. His assumption that Shakspere
“would certainly have attended school” based on
his father’s civic standing, is not the equivalent
of documentary evidence of an education. In contrast, I
cite documentary evidence to support the educational
training of Nashe, Spenser, Kyd, Marlowe, and Middleton,
among others. There is no comparable evidence for
Shakspere.

2. Record
of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters:
Yes, a letter was addressed to Shakespeare by
Richard Quiney (1598). (The letter is not about
literature, and therefore does not qualify for Price’s
“especially” clause, but it does indicate that
Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon was
capable of reading a letter addressed to him and was thus
literate).

Quiney’s letter to
Shakspere concerning borrowing money is not evidence of
Shakspere’s literary career; rather, it is good
evidence that Shakspere was regarded as a man with
financial resources. In contrast, a letter to Drummond by
Drayton discussing his progress on Polyolbion
is solid personal literary evidence. Quiney’s letter
to Shakspere also compares poorly to Samuel Daniel’s
letter to Robert Cecil, (1605), apologizing for “making
the stage the speaker of my lines,” or his letter to
the earl of Devonshire, 1604, explaining that “in
this matter of Philotas … first I told the Lordes I had
written 3 Acts of this tragedie.” There is no
comparable evidence for Shakspere.

Incidentally, I do not argue that Shakspere was
illiterate. On the contrary, on pp. 234-35, I argue that
Shakspere did achieve basic literacy. However, inferring
that Shakspere could read a letter does not prove that he
was a literary giant. I doubt that even Prof. Nelson
would use Quiney’s letter to argue that Shakspere was a
literary giant.

3. Evidence of having been paid to write: Yes. The fact that
he dedicated a second book to the earl of
Southampton is evidence that he received a reward for
having written the first; moreover, he was paid for an impresa
in 1613, clearly as an author, since Burbage was a
painter and would have done the artwork. (It must be said,
however, that Shakespeare as a fellow of his company of
actors would probably not have been paid directly for his
plays, which instead brought him money through the
commercial success which they guaranteed to his company.)

There is no documentary evidence that
Shakspere was rewarded by Southampton, or ever met him.
In contrast, the earl of Leicester’s accounts show a
payment to “Robert Grene that presented a booke to
your lordship vli.” In a letter by Sir George Carey
to his wife, we read that “nashe hath dedicated a
booke unto you with promis of a better, will cotton will
disburs vls
or xx nobles in yowr rewarde to him.” The earl of
Northumberland’s accounts show a payment to “to
one Geo. Peele, a poett, as my Lord’s liberality 3£.”
There is no comparable evidence for Shakspere concerning
rewards from his potential patron.

Despite Prof. Nelson’s assertion, the
wording in the second dedication to Southampton is not evidence
that patronage was received, as I go to some length to
demonstrate. The dedication is couched in typically
formulaic language, suggesting that the poet had heard
reports of the prospective patron’s presumably
generous disposition. So I reject the Lucrece
dedication as evidence that Shakspere obtained patronage,
but this is not, as Prof. Nelson asserts, an arbitrary
disqualification. Rather, this issue provides a good
example of special pleading by the orthodox in defense of
Shakspere’s literary biography. By accepting the Lucrece
dedication as evidence that Shakspere obtained patronage
from Southampton, Prof. Nelson attempts to transmute an
impersonal dedication into a personal one, thus upgrading
its evidentiary value.

Perhaps it is useful to take the time here to
show how another biographer dealt with this question of
personal vs. impersonal dedications. In his
Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems, Arthur
Freeman was considering whether Kyd did or did not know
personally his dedicatee, the Countess of Sussex. Freeman
analyzed the language Kyd used to address her:

All these phrases, especially the
‘service’ and ‘honourable favours past’,
indicate that Kyd was personally acquainted with the
Countess, and that he had been in a position to
receive her favours earlier – presumably before
his imprisonment. Boas comments that ‘Kyd may be
merely alluding to some token of good will which she
extended to him as to other men of letters, including
Greene, who dedicated to her his Philomela ’.
But the fact is that the ‘other men of letters’
who dedicated books to the Countess at this period
did not know her personally, by their own
testimony, and Kyd, by his, did. Greene presented her
Philomela in 1592 because he was ‘humbly
devoted to the Right honourable Lord Fitzwalters your
husband’, but the Countess herself he knew by
repute only. Likewise the publisher William Bailey,
who dedicated a book of lute music to her in 1596,
writes of ‘your Honourable Ladyship, whom I have
heard so well reported of.’ (Freeman, 33)

In the dedication to Lucrece,
Shakespeare writes that “the warrant I have of your
Honourable disposition” made his poem “assured
of acceptance.” In other words, Shakespeare had
heard reports of Southampton’s presumably generous
disposition, just as Bailey writes
of “your Honourable Ladyship, whom I have heard so
well reported of.” Freeman
is demonstrating the same standard to test personal vs.
impersonal evidence. One must suspend this standard in
order to use the Lucrece
dedication as evidence that Shakspere succeeded in
gaining patronage from, or personally knew Southampton.

With respect to the impresa payment, the
document in question provides inadequate evidence with
which to draw any conclusion with confidence. The record
does not contain the first name of the payee (although
the association with Burbage lends weight to the
assumption that William is indeed the payee), but unlike
the payment to Burbage “for painting and making it,”
there is no specification as to the capacity in which
“Mr. Shakspeare” was paid, whether it was to
write a motto, fashion an equestrian accessory, or act as
agent for someone else. Of three interpretations offered
by orthodox scholars, I expect that Stopes’s hunch
that Shakspere was paid as an agent for someone else is
the correct one. Prof. Nelson’s assertion that Shakspere
was paid “clearly as an author” is unsupported
by the record in question.

4. Evidence of a direct relationship with a patron: Yes, the earl of Southampton.

There is no evidence that Shakspere ever met,
much less established a direct or personal relationship
with Southampton. In contrast, John Florio dedicated his
Italian-English Dictionary to the “most Honorable
earl of Southampton, in whose pay and patronage I have
lived some years.” Spenser’s
dedication of
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
to Sir Walter Raleigh refers
to his “infinite debt” owed for “singular
favours and sundry good turns.” The language in
Florio’s and Spenser’s dedications is comparable to
that used in Kyd’s to the Countess of Sussex (see extract
from Freeman’s discussion, above). There is no
comparable evidence for Shakspere and Southampton.

5. Extant original manuscript: Yes, if Hand D in
The Book of Sir Thomas More is his.

The case for “Hand D” as Shakespeare’s
was advanced by A.W. Pollard and several others in 1923
in an attempt to counter the anti-Stratfordian challenge,
coming at that time from Sir George Greenwood and Mark
Twain. Pollard and his colleagues were
attempting to compensate for the deficiency of Shakspere’s
personal literary paper trails, which my comparative
analysis has clearly exposed. Although there
is insufficient evidence with which to make a paleographic
case for “Hand D” as Shakespeare’s, such a
case was advanced nonetheless. The balance of arguments
introduced to corroborate the paleographic case are
inconclusive. Please click on More and page forward to pages 127-133
for the section of my essay that addresses this topic more fully.

Prof. Nelson would allow a checkmark in this
category, qualified with a very big “If.” For
other writers, however, there is no need to enter a
provisional checkmark qualified with “If,”
because we have handwritten manuscripts of the creative
work of, e.g., Jonson, Nashe, Massinger, Harvey, Daniel,
Peele, Drummond, Munday, Middleton, and Heywood. There is
no such evidence for Shakspere.

6. Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on
literary matters. Yes. In a sense this category
merely repeats “Record of correspondence” above.
But a letter survives in the hand of Leonard Digges, who
in 1613 compared the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of
“our Will Shakespeare” - notice the use of the
familiar “Will” by a close neighbor of
Shakespeare’s in both Aldermarston and in London.

Leonard Digges’s notation concerning “our Will Shakespeare” is
found in an inscription (not a letter) written on the fly-leaf
of a book by Lope de Vega. Notice that Digges uses the
impersonal “our.” Had Digges written “my
good friend Will Shakespeare,” Prof. Nelson would
have had a point. Although Digges and Shakspere lived
within proximity to one another, there is no evidence
that the two men knew, or ever met each other.

7. Commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams contributed or received: Yes,
first and foremost in the First Folio, but also in
numerous contemporary manuscripts and printed books.

The Folio
testimony is indeed personal and literary and therefore
can be used to support the statement “Shakspere’s
vocation was writing.” But, as I conclude in chapter
10, “the authorship attribution in the Folio
constitutes the first historical evidence identifying
Shakspere in personal terms as the dramatist. The
evidence is posthumous, and for no other writer of
Shakespeare’s time period are we asked to trust such
ambiguous and belated information,
uncorroborated by any solid
documentation left during the author’s life,
as evidence of authorship.”

The balance of testimony to which Prof. Nelson may refer will
be either impersonal evidence (such as title pages),
impersonal allusions (such as Weever’s sonnet about
Shakespeare), or posthumous references. Prof. Nelson will
not be able to cite any personal allusions or evidence
comparable to that cited for other writers from the time
period; the evidence collected in the appendix for the
two dozen writers is hardly exhaustive, but it is
representative. Whereas Scoloker writes of “Friendly
Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” with no hint of any
personal knowledge of Shakespeare, other writers refer to
their “beloved friend,” “their approved
good friend,” their “honest as loving friend,”
etc. There is no comparable personal evidence for
Shakspere.

8. Miscellaneous
records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer): Yes,
many such records in print, including Meres (1598) who
reports that Shakespeare’s sonnets were circulating among
his private friends (an astonishingly personalized
revelation!), and Thomas Heywood’s reference (1612) to
Shakespeare’s being upset over a book of poems published
by Jaggard.

Prof. Nelson has apparently not understood the
distinction between personal and impersonal evidence,
despite the attention I give to that distinction in
chapter 8. If the testimony need not require firsthand
knowledge of the subject, if an allusion demonstrates
familiarity only with the written work (and not the
author), or if it merely expresses the common opinion, it
is impersonal, not personal evidence.

It may be that Prof. Nelson is simply
following the lead of other orthodox scholars. On pp. 137-38
of my book, I show how Samuel Schoenbaum transmutes
impersonal literary allusions (e.g., “Friendly
Shakespeare’s Tragedies” and “so dear
loved a neighbour…Shakespeare”) into personal
evidence of Shakspere’s circle of friends and
acquaintances.

In Meres’s case, there is no evidence
that he knew who Shakespeare was. As I point out in the
section dealing with Palladis Tamia,
“Meres could have written his commentary based on
what he had been reading, seeing, or hearing around town.
In contrast, one could claim that Meres knew the poet
Barnfield, because he described him as his ‘friend
master Richard Barnfield.’ But Meres named dozens of
writers in his section on English poets, and no one would
suppose that he personally knew every single one of them”
(135).

9. Evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given: Yes,
possibly, in a book now at Stratford and in another at
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (This category
perhaps deserves a blank, but it does not merit a
positive “No.”)

Not one book has
been authenticated as having been owned by Shakspere, so
Prof. Nelson has again demonstrated the need for special
pleading in Shakspere’s case. For Jonson and Harvey,
Spenser, and Drummond, we don’t have to say “yes,
possibly” they owned books. We can say, “yes, certainly,”
because we have their books. And for Nashe, Chapman,
Marston, Lodge, and Fletcher, we have other evidence that
they owned, wrote in, or were bequeathed books, so we don’t
have to suppose a “maybe” for their access to
books either. Once again, Prof. Nelson cannot cite
evidence for Shakspere comparable in quality to that for
his lesser contemporaries.

10. Notice
at death as a writer: Yes, positively and
abundantly, in a poem written by William Basse; the
literary allusions (including to Virgil) in the Funeral
Monument; and above all in the First Folio, which is the
greatest tribute to a recently-deceased writer in all of
English literature.

As I have noted several times, “The authorship attribution in the Folio
constitutes the first historical evidence identifying
Shakspere in personal terms as the dramatist. The
evidence is posthumous, and for no other writer of
Shakespeare’s time period are we asked to trust such
ambiguous and belated information, uncorroborated by any
solid documentation left during the author’s life,
as evidence of authorship.” And considering the
presumed magnitude and impact of Shakespeare’s
career during his lifetime, one reasonably expects to
find the type of contemporaneous professional
documentation one finds so readily for his lesser
contemporaries. By continuing to cite the First Folio as the definitive evidence
supporting Shakspere’s literary biography, critics
merely reinforce my point: there is no evidence left
during Shakspere’s lifetime that likewise qualifies
as both personal and literary. It is a uniquedeficiency.

You will note, if you have read Price’s book with care, how hard she
has worked to discount all evidence which could possibly
contribute to a “Yes” response for Shakespeare
in any of her categories. In fact, the selective demolition of
evidence is what her entire book is about.

In my analysis, I employed consistent
standards to qualify or disqualify evidence as a “personal
literary paper trail.” It will be evident that I did
not play favorites when one looks at the evidence I
rejected for other writers from the time period (see
below). In accepting or rejecting evidence, I merely
followed the guidelines or examples found in other
biographies, such as that cited above from Freeman’s
biography of Kyd. I simply made no exceptions for
Shakspere.

In every biography that I analyzed, including
Shakspere’s, I found contemporaneous documentary
evidence of the individual’s professional or vocational
activity. For two dozen writers, that professional
evidence supported the statement that “he was a
writer.” However, in Shakspere’s case, the
professional evidence supported his activities as a
shareholding actor, real estate investor, commodity
trader, and landlord, but not
a writer. Not until 1623 is there personal literary
evidence for Shakspere.

If Price had worked with equal diligence to discredit the evidence
which applies to other writers of the period, she would have
succeeded in reducing all historical evidence of any kind
whatsoever to utter meaninglessness. Fortunately, all one has to
do is to watch for Price’s instances of special pleading, dismiss
any associated arguments, and let the documentation which
survives this exercise speak for itself.

I did work with equal diligence to accept or disqualify
evidence for other writers. Among the evidence that did not
qualify, and my reason for rejecting the following as
personal literary paper trails, are:

Christopher Marlowe’s signature as
witness to a will; the signature demonstrates his
penmanship, but does not relate to literary
activity

numerous letters in Edmund Spenser’s
handwriting, but they were written in his
capacity as secretary to Lord Grey, and are
unrelated to literary activity

handwritten verse, Happy ye leaves, possibly in
Spenser’s autograph, but there is no certainty

commendatory verse by George Peele to
Thomas Watson for Hekatomathia ;
the tribute is impersonal

Robert Greene’s dedication of The Myrrour of Modestie to the
Countess of Derby; the dedication is couched in
impersonal language, and there is no evidence
that Greene obtained her patronage

Rymer’s Foedera
records a 1618 “license to Samuel Daniel …
to print The Collection of the Historie of England,
compiled by himself,” but since the entry
makes no mention of payment, I did not give
Daniel a checkmark in the category “paid to
write.” However, after my book went to press,
I came across two records of payments to “Danyell
the Poet” in the earl of Hertford’s accounts
(John Pitcher, “Samuel Daniel, the Hertfords,
and A Question of Love,” Review of English Studies 35 [1984],
449-462). I would now add a checkmark for “paid
to write” for Daniel.

Thomas Nashe’s epitaph by Fitzgeffery
which may have been written within twelve months
of Nashe’s death, but Nashe’s exact death date is
not known

George Chapman’s funerary monument,
arranged for by the architect Inigo Jones; the
date of its installation is unknown

Finally, I agree that the documentation speaks
for itself, and that is why I compiled the appendix of
comparative evidence for Shakspere and two dozen of his
contemporaries.

Alan Nelson’s Reply to Diana Price’s Reply

Prof. Alan Nelson’s reply to my rebuttal is posted on
his website at socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/.
Following is the text of his rebuttal in blue, with the author’s response (indented).

Diana Price’s reply to my “review” is just another instance of special pleading. To avoid an exponential inflation of argument
I limit myself to one topic, from which the reader may extrapolate to others.

I will concentrate on Price’s Topic 6, which she herself entitles: “Handwritten inscriptions, receipts,
letters, etc., touching on literary matters.”

In her reply, Price overlooks the point of her own argument, for in 1613, while Shakespeare was
still alive, Leonard Digges composed a handwritten inscription directly concerning William Shakespeare
and directly touching on literary matters. Regardless of anything else, Price’s analysis of this particular
topic should have led her to respond with an unequivocal YES. Thus this single topic demolishes her
controlling thesis that William Shakespeare fails to qualify in a single one of her categories.

Price asserts that Digges did not write a letter in 1613, but merely an inscription.
This is a quibble. Yes, Digges wrote on a flyleaf of a book, but what he wrote on that
flyleaf is clearly a letter, addressed to “Will Baker” and signed “Leo: Digges".

With respect to an acquaintanceship, Price asserts:

Although Digges and Shakspere lived within proximity to one another,
there is no evidence that the two men knew, or ever met each other.

In point of historical and documentary fact, there is an extraordinarily close family connection
between the two: Leonard Digges was the step-son (from 1603) of Thomas Russell, a man who
was not only a neighbor of Shakespeare’s both in London and in Stratford, but whom
Shakespeare remembered in his will, and indeed appointed one of the two overseers of his will.

In short: Leonard Digges was the step-son of Shakespeare’s particularly close personal friend and overseer.

So close was Digges himself to Shakespeare that he called him not “Shakespeare,"
“William Shakespeare,” or “Mr. Shakespeare,” but - with singular affection and using his nick-name - “our Will Shakespeare".

With regard to the latter, Price states:

Notice that Digges uses the impersonal “our.” Had Digges written “my good friend Will Shakespeare,"
Prof. Nelson would have had a point.

But to assert that “our” is impersonal while “my” is personal is both inaccurate
and tendentious, for “our” is simply the plural of “my", entirely appropriate in
a literary discussion among three close friends, Will Baker, James Mabbe, and Leonard Digges.

Note that Price goes so far as to specify the language she would consider
acceptable; since the language she specifies does not occur here,
she rules the phrase - and the document - out of court.

Granted that the phrase in question could mean “our (English) Will Shakespeare” as well
as “our (common friend) Will Shakespeare,” Price has no grounds beyond sheer personal bias
for prefering the first of these two significations over the second. Perhaps
more important as concerns her argument, even the second remains
a “Handwritten inscription, touching on literary matters.”

Diana Price responds

Prof. Nelson and I disagree over whether Digges’s allusion to Shakespeare is personal or impersonal.
This distinction is critical in the construction of biography. As I demonstrate in my book (137-38),
Shakespeare’s biographers, including Samuel Schoenbaum, convert impersonal allusions to Shakespeare’s
works into personal evidence of his character and circle of friends. Yet, as many biographers of other
subjects have pointed out, some allusions “are of a purely literary character and necessitate
no personal knowledge” (Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle, London, 1934: 11).

Leonard Digges’s comments about Lope de Vega and Shakespeare is an impersonal allusion,
and fortunately, the inscription is sufficiently straightforward as to leave no room
for doubt. Here is the full text of the inscription (Paul Morgan, Shakespeare Survey #16, 1963: 118-20):

Will Baker: Knowinge
that Mr Mab: was to
sende you this Booke
of sonnets, wch with Spaniards
here is accounted of their
lope de Vega as in Englande
wee sholde of o[u]r: Will
Shakespeare. I colde not
but insert thus much to
you, that if you like
him not, you muste never
never reade Spanishe Poet
Leo: Digges

This is not about mutual friends, it’s about comparing the reputations of two poets who are recognized
as the pride of their respective countries. Digges compares Lope de Vega’s literary reputation in Spain
with Shakespeare’s in England ("which with Spaniards here is accounted of their
lope de Vega as in Englande wee sholde of
o[u]r : Will Shakespeare” [emphases added]. There is nothing in this inscription to suggest
that Digges was a friend of, or was known to Shakespeare.

Digges’s inscription to Will Baker is evidence that Digges knew Baker; that Digges at one time had
possession of this book; that he considered Lope de Vega an excellent writer; and that in his opinion,
Shakespeare’s works deserved to be esteemed in England as Lope de Vega’s were in Spain.
This literary opinion is consistent with Digges’s two poems about Shakespeare.
But the inscription is not evidence that Digges knew the man who wrote the works of Shakespeare,
nor for that matter, Lope de Vega. Digges’s impersonal allusion to Shakespeare can be transmuted
into personal evidence only by special pleading.

Leonard Digges subsequently wrote two poems on Shakespeare: the first, published in the 1623 First Folio,
refers openly to the playwright’s Stratford monument; the second, published in 1640 (but written like
the first about 1622), openly credits Shakespeare with the enduring success of his company, the King’s Men.

My point is proved: for Price to deny the obvious significance of Leonard Digges’s letter of 1613
is nothing but special pleading.

The assumption that Digges and Shakespeare were personally acquainted is widely held,
so I will take this opportunity to comment further. Morgan, who introduced Digges’s
inscription in the Shakespeare Survey, qualifies his statements about Digges and
Shakespeare; Morgan cites Leslie Hotson’s I, William Shakespeare, and concludes
that “it seems certain that Digges was personally acquainted with his great contemporary” (118-19).
The reason that Morgan must write that “it seems certain,” as opposed to “it is certain” is
quite simple. It is not certain. The very allusion Morgan was introducing did not remove doubt,
as his own qualified statement demonstrates. Since there is no documentary evidence showing
that the two men knew each other, and no personal literary allusions, Shakespeare’s and
Digges’s personal relationship remains a matter of conjecture.

As far as we know, Leonard Digges wrote about Shakespeare three times, the flyleaf
inscription being the first. He also wrote two tributes to Shakespeare, one published
in the 1623 First Folio, the other in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems.
According to John Freehafer ("Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry,"
Shakespeare Quarterly 21, winter 1970, 63-75), Digges’s tributes “refer vividly to the
early staging and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays, reveal an exceptional enthusiasm for those plays,
and record the views of a scholar who was associated with the Shakespeare circle in both
Stratford and London” (63). To support his statement that Digges was “associated with the Shakespeare
circle,” Freehafer cites pp. 237-59 of Leslie Hotson’s I, William Shakespeare.

But Leslie Hotson’s discussion of the links between the Digges family, Thomas Russell, and
Shakespeare, provides no evidence that Shakespeare knew Digges, either. Shakespeare’s will
is good evidence that he and Thomas Russell were acquainted, but it does not tell us that
Shakespeare knew Thomas Russell’s family, including Russell’s step-son, Leonard. Hotson
says that Digges “in his youth in Aldermanbury had well known the actors Heminges and Condell;
and finally he had grown up under his stepfather’s care as Shakespeare’s neighbor and friend
at Alderminster by Stratford” (244). But this is an assumption that relies on proximity, on
the assumption that two people living in the same neighborhood know each other. A few
degrees of separation does not constitute evidence of personal relationships.

The circumstances under which Digges contributed his poem to the First Folio point,
not to Shakespeare, but to Digges’s documented relationship with one of its publishers, Edward Blount.
Arthur W. Secord points out that “commendatory verses were sometime written in the interest of the publisher,"
and he argues that this was the case with the First Folio
("I.M. of the First Folio of Shakespeare and Other Mabbe Problems,"
Journal of English and German Philology 47, 1948: 374-81). Hotson (244) likewise supposes that Blount “was probably responsible"
for soliciting verses from James Mabbe and Leonard Digges. (The case for Mabbe as the author of the
poem subscribed with “I.M” in the Folio was summarized by Secord and is accepted today by most scholars.)

Blount published Digges’s translation of Claudian in 1617 and his translation of Cespeses’s Gerardo
the year before the Folio. In 1623, Digges contributed an impersonal commendatory verse to Guzman’s
The Rogue, translated by James Mabbe, and published by Blount. Ben Jonson wrote verse for Mabbe’s
book, and Blount had published Jonson’s 1605 Sejanus. Finally, Hotson (255) cites Digges’s letter to
one Philip Washington in 1632, with the postscript: “I pray send the enclosed to Ned Blount,” further
corroborating their relationship. In short, Digges’s poem in the First Folio is accounted for
by his documented relationship with Blount, but his personal relationship with Shakespeare remains a matter of speculation.

Note: The summary here is adapted from the article in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 42 (2003): 62-78.
The author gratefully acknowledges the kind permission of Peter Greenfield, then editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama
(RORD), for permission to reproduce the box office chart. RORD is now at Romard .

The hypothesis : “Henslowe’s “ne” marks a
performance at which twice the usual admission fee was charged at the doors to
the Rose, whether that performance was — or was not — the premiere.
The probable scale of admissions for the Rose, with estimated capacity in
parentheses, can be summarized as:

1d for the yard (500)

2d for the galleries or two-penny rooms (1,568)

3d for the gentlemen’s room (40)

6d for admission to the lords’ room and possibly, for a stool
on-stage (16)

The largest receipts generated by a non- “ne”
performance are only a few shillings less than the largest “ne” receipts, so
not all admission fees could have been doubled. The double price evidently was
charged only at the main entrances to the theater. Playgoers continuing on to a gallery then
paid the usual extra penny, not two extra pennies. Those heading for the
gentlemen’s rooms presumably paid the usual third penny after having passed
through the main door and the gallery door at the stairwell. Gallery admissions
were the same for “ne” and non- “ne” performances, and Henslowe did not benefit
from the second penny charged at the main entrances at “ne” performances. So
the differential between “ne” and non- “ne” revenues cannot be explained by the
take at the main gates.

However, the playgoers occupying the most expensive
seats did not enter the theater through the main doors. They entered through
the tiring-house door. And Henslowe would benefit from those admissions. If
Henslowe charged sixteen lord’s room customers at double the usual rate (i.e.,
12d) at the tiring-house door at “ne” performances, he could gross up to
192d or 16s. His 50% share would be 96d or 8s, so
at maximum capacity, “ne” sums would exceed non- “ne” sums by approximately 4s.
Three projected “box office” statements for three
performances (see below) support this assumption.

In his papers, Henslowe twice recorded numerical
tables in which “n” stands for the numeral “2,” so
“ne” may be his
shorthand for the word “twice ” or “double ” (2 plus the final “e”
in “twice” or “double.”)

If “ne” signifies “twice” the usual entry fee
for plays so marked between February 1592 and November 1597, then such “ne”
plays may be newly-composed, newly revised, or simply promoted at twice the
price, perhaps to cash in on a play’s popularity or a special occasion. So
while it is possible to infer that many, probably most of the plays marked “ne”
were new, at least to Henslowe, a “ne” annotation is not prima facie
evidence that the play was newly-composed. Conversely, a non- “ne” play is not
necessarily an old one.

Dr Faustus

Harry vi

Tragedy of the Gyves

non-"ne" (Sept. 30, 1594)

ne (March 3, 1592)

ne (30 January 1593)

Main Gate gathering stations

Projected capacity

Admission fee

Paid Attendance

Revenue (pence)

Admission fee

Paid Attendance

Revenue (pence)

Admission fee

Paid Attendance

Revenue (pence)

1

Groundlings

500

1

500

500

2

500

1,000

2

500

1,000

2

Galleries

1,568

1

1,552

1,552

2

1,568

3,136

2

1,504

3,008

3

Gentlemen’s rooms

40

1

40

40

2

40

80

2

40

80

Galleries gathering stations

4

Two-penny rooms

1

1,552

1,552

1

1,568

1,568

1

1,504

1,504

5

Gentlemen’s rooms

1

40

40

1

40

40

1

40

40

6

Doors to Gentlemen’s rooms

1

40

40

1

40

40

1

40

40

7

Tiring-house door: lords' room (& stools?)

16

6

16

96

12

16

192

12

16

192

8

Total attendance (lines 1,2,3,7)

2,124

2,108

2,124

2,060

9

Gross revenue for galleries and tiring-house (lines 4-7)

1,728

1,840

1,776

Henslowe’s 50% share of line 9 (pence)

864

920

888

Figure 1. Three “box office statements” for the Rose playhouse. These statements attempt to reconcile one possible configuration of the Rose and admission scale, with the sums of money that Henslowe recorded.

Principal bibliography for this
article appears here; additional bibliography appears in the notes to the
original article.

Note: For convenience, I use “Shakespeare” when referring to the author
of the plays and poems, and “Shakspere” when referring to the man from
Stratford; original spellings are in quotation marks.

On an overlong thread of exchanges below my Amazon.com review of
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy
(ed. Wells and Edmonton), Tom Reedy pointed out that by
1599, when the College of Heralds evidently approved the applications for John
Shakspere’s coat of arms, son William was automatically entitled to style
himself “Mr” and to use a version of the arms.

In my book, I state that William was entitled to style himself “gent”
only after his father died; his father never used the term “gent” and the
Burial Register record did not identify him as “gent,” only as “Mr.” John Shakspere.
John had been entitled to use the honorific “Mr” by virtue of his one term as
bailiff (the equivalent of a modern-day mayor) of Stratford-on-Avon. Reedy elsewhere
recommended reference to B. Roland Lewis’s The Shakespeare Documents,
which, ironically enough, was the source for my
mistaken impression, as indicated in my citation (which Mr. Reedy seems to have
missed).

When researching this subject, I had consulted Lewis and several sources
in his bibliography, including Guy Rothery. When I consulted Fox-Davies, I failed
to find the section setting forth the protocols for eldest sons. Subsequently,
after taking note of Mr. Reedy’s correction, I
revisited Fox-Davies and found a section under the term “label”: “The eldest
son during the lifetime of his father differences his arms by a label of three
points couped at the ends…succeeding to the undifferenced
shield on the death of his father” (487). Since, by definition a gentleman is
“a man entitled to bear arms,” then by extension, the eldest son, bearing a
‘differenced’ coat of arms, could style himself a “gentleman” (Fox-Davies, 21).
In general, I have found Lewis to be reliable, but
my
spot-check
of his bibliography was obviously insufficient in this case,
and Shakspere was entitled to style himself “Mr” in 1599.

For Mr. Reedy, this is no trifling detail. He claims that the grant of the coat of arms immediately
conferred on son William the title “Mr.”, and that this styling, in turn,
proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that William of Stratford wrote the plays. Mr.
Reedy’s slam-dunk is based on the 23 August 1600
entry in the Stationers Register (SR) of Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV(2),
both recorded as “Wrytten by master Shakespere” (Arber, 3:170).1
(Neither title page contains the word “master”). So the “master” in the SR
entry, according to Mr. Reedy, proves that Shakespeare of Stratford was the
dramatist.

However, an entry in the SR is not a personal literary paper trail. Like
title-pages, entries in the Stationers Registers are not necessarily reliable
with respect to authorship or attribution, and they are usually impersonal
evidence, i.e., the information and details could appear without any
involvement by the actual author. For example, the SR entry for A Yorkshire Tragedy (as well as the
title page, printed in 1608) reads “by Wylliam Shakespere” (Greg, 16), although almost all scholars
consider it a play by Thomas Middleton (Proudfoot, 60-61;
Vickers, “Authorship,” 113). Titles themselves can also falsely claim
authorship, such as Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (1592) or
Willobie His Avisa (1594). The SR is similarly unreliable for the 8 November 1623 SR (and
title-page) for the First Folio,
which reads in part “Mr William Shakspeers … Henry
the eight … Timon of Athens … and Mackbeth,” despite the identification of numerous co-authors,
such as John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton (Vickers, “Incomplete,” 311). As
Tiffany Stern demonstrates, catalogue and license entries are unreliable
sources for play titles and authorship (“Forgery,” 557-58).

The matter of son William’s entitlement to style himself “Mr” and use
the “label” or differenced arms upon approval from the College of Heralds ca.
1599 raises yet more issues as a telling microcosm of Shakespearean biography. In
his two-volume Facts and Problems, Chambers
spends over fourteen pages on the coat of arms, including speculation on the
Arden arms proposed for exemplification, but he has not a word to say about son
William’s role in it all (he introduces a scene from Every Man Out of His Humour : “Sogliardo’s motto seems to glance at
Shakespeare’s, although the coat does not resemble his” and specifies further reservations
about including the allusion (2:202-3). Rothery states that it was son
William’s ambition that drove the coat of arms application but does not
elaborate on the protocols. I do not recall any biographer or historian presenting
this information, not even Robert Bearman, when he was considering the evidence
of William’s social ambitions and pretensions in his book on the Stratford
Records (17, 43). The protocol certainly strengthens his case that William was
indeed a social-climbing upstart, pursuing the trappings and stylings of the upwardly
mobile and aspiring landed gentry.

Do any biographers have something to say about the eldest son’s
entitlement to privileges immediately upon approval by the College of Heralds?
And, more importantly, do they make the connection to the SR entry for Much Ado and
H4(2) ? They do not. E.K. Chambers doesn’t, not in his sections on the
relevant quartos nor in the coat of arms section ([William]
“could of course have made a fresh application in his own name, which would
have been irregular during his father’s lifetime” (2:23). Sidney Lee doesn’t
(281-87). Neither does Samuel Schoenbaum; “John Shakespeare renewed his
application- or, more likely, his son did … it was proper that the grant be
made to the oldest male in the direct line … There was nothing, however, to
prevent the eldest son from setting into motion the machinery for a grant in
which the entire family would take pride” (227-28; see also 38-39). James
Shapiro surely would have reported on this matter in Contested Will,
but all he says is that “the Shakespeares’ request
in 1596 for a grant of a coat of arms – bestowing on the Stratford glover and
his actor son the status of gentlemen” (19) (he doesn’t mention the matter in A Year in the Life). Matus doesn’t
mention it, either. After mentioning the coat of arms for father John, Arthur
F. Kinney states that “in time, William would have a coat of arms too” (2), so
he evidently did not assume William’s automatic entitlement.
In
the same volume, James Kearney likewise stated that the status so obtained for
the father would, in theory, be inherited by the dutiful son” (183).

The Oxford Textual Companion
editors don’t make the connection (351, 371). Neither does the Arden Two editor
of Much Ado or Henry IV(2), and he factors into the date of Much Ado
considerations based, not on the coat of arms, but on
Kemp’s departure from the company early in 1599 (3); the Arden 3 editor
of Much Ado is also silent on the matter (McEachern,
125-27).

Why are all these major biographers and editors silent on the matter, if
indeed Mr. Reedy is correct to claim that the SR entry is the clinching piece
of evidence that Shakspere of Stratford was the dramatist? If a title-page is
not necessarily reliable evidence of attribution or authorship, an entry in the
SR cannot compensate for that unreliability. Perhaps biographers missed the
details, or perhaps they intuitively understand that an entry in the SR is not
reliable evidence of authorship or attribution, and so remain silent.

I would propose that the “mr” does have some
significance in the interpretation of other evidence. In particular, it strengthens
the case for Sogliardo as a satirical portrait of Shakspere, and it reinforces
the other important documentary evidence of his social posturing and ambitions,
i.e., the exemplification of the purchase of New Place, and particular
provisions in his last will. Upon
correcting the necessary sentences, the unorthodox narrative does not change
much.

However, it presents more of an obstacle to Robert
Bearman’s recent reinvestigation into the New Place exemplification
documentation, in which he attempts to reconsider some claims in his earlier
Shakespeare in the Stratford Records. In
his 1994 book, Bearman speculated that Shakspere, “like the other ‘new’ gentry
of his time, was indulging in a little harmless snobbery. There are many other
examples of middle-class families who invested their money in lands… . They
then had their title to these secured by elaborate certified copies of their
deeds, and kept the College of Heralds busy by making tenuous claims to a right
to bear a coat of arms in order to secure entry into the élite band of gentry. We cannot assume that Shakespeare was above such things” (18).

Bearman’s 2012 article proposes a more altruistic
narrative: “Far from being an ostentatious display of newly acquired wealth, Shakespeare’s
acquisition of New Place may instead be interpreted simply as his taking
advantage of an opportunity to provide a home not only for his wife and children
but also perhaps his parents and three of four unmarried siblings” (485).
Bearman further suggests that the exemplification may have been obtained
instead “to ensure that his agreement with Underhill [the seller] by final concord
was given additional weight by arranging for its exemplification” (483), in
other words as a legal safeguard “to a sale by final concord only” (485). Putting
a more charitable spin to the narrative will place that narrative in more
conflict with the balance of evidence attesting to Shakspere’s selfish
opportunism and mean streak, such as the evidence of Thomas Whittington’s will;
the evident lack of effort made to ensure father John’s burial in the parish
register as a “gent.”; and especially the terms of Shakspere’s last will,
including bequests to his close circle of upwardly-mobile landowners and
businessmen, and his less-than-loving treatment of his daughters and widow (Honigmann,
“Businessman,” 41; Price, 302-4).

My unorthodox narrative is, if anything, strengthened by the coat of
arms and Shakspere’s immediate entitlements. Jonson’s satirical portrayal of
Sogliardo’s purchase of a coat of arms gains more immediacy and bite. If my theory is correct, if Shakespeare
bought and sold, or traded in costumes, properties, and playbooks, then the 1600
SR entry reflects “mr” Shakspere’s role as an agent of transmission.
His surviving theatrical evidence, and a comparison of that evidence
with evidence in which other business agents, whether John Heming, Christopher
Beeston, or Thomas Greene, are named, supports the theory.
These
unorthodox narratives theory are reinforced by the testimony of George Buc, the
Heywood apology, Battillus allusions, and so on (Price, e.g., 61-65,
102-8,108-11).

In conclusion, my statement (67) that William needed to wait until his
father died to adopt the coat of arms and title for himself stands corrected,
but the SR entry does not constitute proof, as Mr. Reedy claims, that Shakspere wrote
Much Ado About Nothing, Henry IV(2) or A Yorkshire Tragedy.

1 Mr. Reedy’s exasperation
notwithstanding, the actual wording of the entry in the SR, i.e., whether it
reads “Mr” or “Master,” is understandably a matter of
some confusion, especially for those without immediate access to Arber. In his Bibliography,
Greg cites the SR wording as both “mr
Shakespere” and then “Shakespere”
with no title (16, 272, 274). Chambers’s SR entry
reports “master Shakespeare” (1:377, 1:384), and he cites Arber. The Arden 2
editor, A.R. Humphreys cites “master Shakespere”
for both Much Ado (2-3) and H4 (2) (xi). Wells and Taylor cite “mr Shakespere”
(351). The Malone Society Reprint of Henry IV(2) has “Wrytten by mr Shakespere”
(v). The terms “master” and “Mr” would appear, for
many scholars, to be interchangeable.

Bibliography

Arber, Edward.
A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1650 A.D. 5 vols. 1875-94.
Reprint, New York: Peter Smith, 1950.

Greg, W. W.
A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration.Vol. 1, “Stationer’s Records, Plays to 1616: Nos. 1-349.” London: Oxford University Press, 1939.

Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998.

Honigmann, E.A.J. “’There Is a World Elsewhere’: William Shakespeare, Businessman.” In
Werner Habich, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle, eds.,
Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, 40-46.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.

On the assumption that from Shakespeare’s poems and plays could be extracted a well-rounded conception of the author that was as
authentic as one derived from personal letters, eyewitness accounts, and other such documents, every line was searched for hidden
biography. To many critics, the sonnets were the chief key to the mystery, and an incalculable amount of time and labor was spent
on elucidating their enigmatic statements, which, a century and a half after the industry began, still defy interpretation that
is generally acceptable. To others, the living Shakespeare could be discovered in the plays instead. And he was discovered: as a
Tory and a Radical, a Protestant and a Catholic (or else a freethinker), a widely traveled cosmopolitan and a stay-at-home, a
heavily learned savant and a fresh-cheeked countryman, a soldier and a seaman, a shrewd businessman and a musician, a sportsman
and a naturalist. Whatever one’s preference, it could be documented from Shakespeare’s works. However sharply the commentators’
versions of Shakespeare the man conflicted with one another, taken altogether, they represent “the largest mass of conjectural
biography under which any author has ever staggered on his way to immortality.”(97)

The criteria for the acceptance of an attribution as proven have traditionally been based on legal models for the evaluation of
evidence… . Certain basic standards of proof are common to both. In criminal law, guilt has to be proved beyond reasonable
doubt; in civil cases the balance of probability determines the findings. In attribution studies the second would be sufficient
to let a received attribution stand but … it would require the first to overturn an accepted attribution or to establish a
new one from scratch.(209)

The prudent archaeo-historicist must cultivate a habit of perpetual doubt and suspicion. Do we have first-hand reportage or
hearsay? How close to the date of the event? Are we working from holograph, fair copy, or a printed version? What is the
likelihood of doctoring? … Even where tampering or fabrication are not an issue, the scholar must be rigorous about taking the
possibility of bias into account. … One often cannot be sure of the reliability of crucial evidence, but one can at least be
above-board in indicating the degree of doubt that attaches to it.(124, 125)

At the outset of any genuine inquiry, the investigator must attempt to determine what evidence exists, how it can be tested or
validated, and how far it should be trusted.(159)

Whether the investigator is relying on texts or anecdotes or generic categories or historical context or statistics of whatever
sort, some sceptical testing is well advised. Something that looks fine to the casual eye (and has gone unchallenged for decades)
can crumble disconcertingly when someone tests it. Neither primary evidence nor present-day hypothesis should be employed unless
subjected to severe interrogation. To use a piece of evidence just because respected predecessors have used it can only be
considered reckless and irresponsible. No investigator can be expected to conduct exhaustive tests on everything employed. A
serious scholar, however, performs what the financial world calls ‘due diligence’, which means enough systematic spot-checking
that blatant problems should come to light.(160)

To put the point bluntly, if you commit to a system of explanations you become a fanatic and cease to be an inquirer. Or as [R.S.]
Crane observes, prior commitment to theory is ‘incompatible with inquiry.’(161)

The historian can and in fact must do what the judge, at any rate in England, is precluded from doing, make the best of evidence
which is not strictly first hand.(49)

— H.B. George, Historical Evidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909)

Events reported by writers secondhand frequently become trusted documents for theater historians. … Because of its presentation, a
historian might trust such a source, and if confirmation was warranted external sources might be consulted to corroborate the
account. Nonetheless, in many cases no independent verification exists, leaving the historian at the mercy of the author and his
integrity. … One can only hope for authors who are largely accurate in citing their sources and expressing their intentions. But
… in an era in which oral and written communication were well-developed arts the telling of “truth” and the telling of rumor
could be largely the same.(31-32)

What a man leaves behind him after he dies is a mess of paper: birth certificate, school grades, diary, letters, check stubs,
laundry lists … This paper trail, extending from his entrance to his exit, is what the biographer tries to tread.(xiii)

The sources whence we directly derive our information, whatever the quality of that information may be, are usually divided into
those which are, and those which are not contemporary. …‘Historical evidence, like every kind of evidence [quoting Cornewall
Lewis] is founded on the testimony of credible witnesses. Unless those witnesses have personal and immediate perception of the
facts which they report, unless they saw and heard what they undertake to relate as having happened, their evidence is not
entitled to credit. As all original witnesses must be contemporary with the events which they attest, it is a necessary condition
for the credibility of a witness that he be a contemporary, though a contemporary is not necessarily a credible witness.’(48-49)

— H.B. George, Historical Evidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909)

A primary source is a document, image, or artifact that provides evidence about the past. It is an original document created
contemporaneously with the event under discussion.(58)

— Robert C. Williams, The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2003)

RELIABILITY

Eyewitness reports from ostensibly neutral observers will not necessarily agree.(123)

In the midst of complex jealousies and desires for self-justification, the external juxtaposition of the whitewash brush and the
tar bucket, we can never be sure either of all the relevant facts or of the true motives of people long dead.(49)

This pamphlet gathering five heterogeneous Letters contains several references to unpublished poems and the interests of a
literary coterie, to current events and affairs of state, and to well-placed people in public life. The Letters testify to the
credentials of the “new Poete” [Spenser]. … As soon as we recognize, however, that the Letters are public rather than private
documents, we have placed their evidentiary value in doubt. The efforts to fashion a poetic persona that had motivated the
[Shephearde’s ] Calendar ’s elaborate program are also evident in the Letters. Why should we expect these texts to provide
trustworthy information about the private person.(81)

The Letters are of interest primarily for what they tell us about the two writers’ friendship and Harvey’s importance in Spenser’s
formation as a poet and a public servant.(93).

— Jon A. Quitslund,
“Questionable Evidence in the Letters of 1580 between Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser,” in Spenser’s Life
and the Subject of Biography,
ed. Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, David A. Richardson
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996)

PERSONAL VS. IMPERSONAL EVIDENCE

Allusions to Shakespeare in [Henry] Chettle’s England Mourning Garment are of a purely literary character and necessitate no
personal knowledge.(11)

— Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London, 1934)

[Thomas] Kyd’s translation … is dedicated ‘To … the Countesse of Sussex.’ … Among the conventional praises of her Ladyship’s wit,
beauty, and virtue, Kyd takes to refer to her ‘honourable favours past,’ which he will not itemize because he considers it
‘Pharasaical’ to do so. … All these phrases, especially the ‘service’ and ‘honourable favours past’, indicate that Kyd was
personally acquainted with the Countess, and that he had been in a position to receive her favours earlier – presumably before
his imprisonment. Boas comments that ‘Kyd may be merely alluding to some tokens of good will which she extended to him as to
other men of letters, including Greene, who dedicated to her his Philomela ’. But the fact is that the ‘other men of letters’ who
dedicated books to the Countess at this period did not know her personally, by their own testimony, and Kyd, by his, did. Greene
presented her Philomela in 1592 because he was ‘humbly devoted to the Right honourable Lord Fitzwalters your husband’, but the
Countess herself he knew by repute only. Likewise the publisher William Bailey, who dedicated a book of lute music to her in
1596, writes of ‘your Honourable Ladyship, whom I have heard so well reported of.’(32-34)

Gervase Markham dedicated The Most Honorable Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvile (1595) to Lord Mountjoy, and added three sonnets,
the second of which is to [the earl of] Southampton, but there is no indication in it that Markham enjoyed any degree of
intimacy; while he acknowledges Mountjoy’s favor, he only makes a bid for Southampton’s.(2:200)

— D. Nichol Smith, “Authors and Patrons,” in Shakespeare’s England
: An Account of the Life and Manners of his Age (2 vols. 1916.
Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1962)

[George] Chapman may drop the names of the earls of Derby and Northumberland in his first letter to Matthew Royden, but these are
strategic claims of association, hardly signs that he knew these powerful men.(6)

— John Huntington, Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001)

It has been suggested that in using the epithet ‘friendly’, Scoloker is claiming acquaintance with Shakespeare. However, the
epithet may, rather, be a literary judgment, approximating what we might now call ‘accessible,’ ‘readable,’ or even
‘user-friendly’.(179)

There is ample testimony in commendatory poems and dedications of the number of our playwright’s friends and of the regard in
which they held him. Joseph Taylor the actor, who played Paris in The Roman Actor, addresses [Philip] Massinger as ‘his
long-known and loved Friend’, and says that he (Taylor) writes his poem both to praise a good tragedy and “to profess our love’s
antiquity’. … To the ubiquitous George Donne he is his ‘much esteem’d friend’; and to Thomas May he is ‘his deserving friend’.
There is no indication of friendship or of more than a slight acquaintanceship in John Ford’s commendatory poems for
The Roman
Actor
and The Great Duke of Florence. Shirley, too, … does not seems to have been very close to Massinger, and addresses him
stiffly as ‘my honoured friend’ in the verses before The Renegado. In return, in his commendation of The Grateful Servant,
Massinger calls Shirley his ‘judicious and learned friend the Author’. … As might be expected, the majority of Massinger’s
friends were either writers by profession or men-of-letters by inclination.(45)

— T.A. Dunn, Philip Massinger: The Man and the Playwright (University College of Ghana by Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1957)

Spenser continued his praise of [Thomas] Watson in The Ruines of Time … . That it was prompted by personal friendship, or even
acquaintance, is unlikely. It is doubtful whether the two men could have met before Spenser went to Ireland in 1580, and when he
returned to England in 1589 Watson was in Newgate prison as the result of an affray, and remained there until after the
publication of the Faerie Queen. … Spenser’s praise of Watson, I think, was probably motivated simply by his admiration for him
as an artist.(486, 487)

Autographs are more plentiful for Spenser than for most other Elizabethan literary figures. They comprise over a hundred items,
being roughly equivalent in quantity to 120 folio pages of continuous writing, and include eleven authentic signatures. However,
no autograph survives from the Spenser canon, the only literary document of any kind being a single-leaf transcript of a Latin
letter on poetry from Erhardus Stibarus to Erasmus Neustetter and two Latin poems from Lotichius’ Poemata.(345)

Efforts to identify the author of the Arte have proved inconclusive. … [Richard Puttenham’s] … biographical evidence, so far as it
goes, presents no serious difficulties, but …the absence of any indication of literary activities or intellectual interests
renders his case both doubtful and problematic. He is a runner in the Arte sweepstakes, but his chances can only appeal to a
gambler who will take a risk on a dark horse at very long odds.(xii, xvii-xviii)

On George [Puttenham]’s behalf a much stronger claim can be made. Two lines of approach to the question of his authorship are
open: the biographical and the literary. … That he had both an adequate knowledge of Latin and an interest in its literature is
shown by some fragments of translation from Suetonius. Further indication of intellectual interests is contained in a letter of
1578 … [and] conclusive proof both of his ability as a writer and of its recognition is provided by his Justificacion.(xviii,
xxii)

Let him amass all the evidence he can find. Let him set down, in orderly fashion, all the arguments in favor of his
interpretation, and then, with equal or greater scrupulousness, all those against. Let him study the evidence, giving full value
to every argument; for it may very well happen that a single bit of contra evidence will make the piling up of pro arguments like
the adding together of zeros: whether there are twelve or twenty, the total is still zero.(228-29)

— Chauncey Sanders, An Introduction to Research in English Literary History (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1952)

External evidence may and often does provide incontestable proof; internal evidence can only support hypotheses or corroborate
external evidence.(150)

The uncritical acceptance of an attribution on a title page or in a bookseller’s catalogue is quite as unscholarly as an attempt
to prove authorship through the unsophisticated citing of similarities between disputed and undisputed plays.(21)

An edition of Sir John Oldcastle in 1600 likewise bears the words, ‘Written by William Shakespeare,’ and this boast, absurd on the
face of it, is proved mendacious beyond the shadow of a doubt, by the record in Henslowe’s Diary of the actual authors: Munday,
Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway.(viii)

Auxiliary “do” evidence puts this play [The Puritan ] well beyond the possibility of Shakespearean authorship. … Auxiliary “do”
evidence rules Shakespeare out as the author of the whole text of [A Yorkshire Tragedy ]. As with The Puritan, Middleton is
confirmed as a possible candidate for authorship.(153)

The Cleveland Plain Dealer does not
grant permission to reprint articles in their entirety on web
sites, so the following is the author’s response (indented)
to specific points raised in the review by Marianne
Evett on Monday, December 18, 2000:

The reviewer singles out the comparative
analysis of Literary Paper Trails as the “new evidence”
claimed in my title, and reports that according to my book,
“only Shakespeare fails the test.”

The comparative analysis of
evidence supporting the literary biographies for Shakespeare
and two dozen of his contemporaries is one of five major new
arguments; all are summarized on the home page. None of the
other new arguments was noticed by this reviewer.

The reviewer suggests that the “sheer
volume of detail and scholarly superstructure may convince some
readers” but that the book is “slow going.”

This reviewer has grudgingly
acknowledged the scholarship supporting my arguments. I would
agree that some of the book, especially chapters 4-7 and
parts of chapter 11, can be “slow going,” but that
is the fairly predictable result of an analysis that attempts
to be comprehensive. My decision to examine all the principal
documentation for, and allusions to, Shakespeare necessarily
requires in-depth analyses of historical records, prose, and
verse, and a consideration of what previous biographers and
historians have concluded from that evidence. The reviewer
admitted that my handling of the material was “clear,”
but criticized my examination in minute detail of “works
no longer very accessible to the general reader.” This
reviewer seems to be again (inadvertently) complimenting my
research, although I hasten to point out that nearly all of
the sources listed in my bibliography were accessed at The
Cleveland Public Library.

The reviewer claims that many of my
arguments are seriously flawed. She acknowledges that there are
indeed “gaps in the historical records,” but asserts
that “the explanations for those gaps are at least as
plausible on the positive side as those Price offers on the
negative.”

My book challenges the
traditional explanations for the “gaps in the historical
records.” It is up to the reader to decide whether the
unorthodox narrative that I re-construct for Shakespeare is
more plausible.

The reviewer objects to my criteria of
rejecting hearsay and posthumous evidence in my analysis, because
it results in “a very narrow and subjective interpretation
of contemporary references.” The reviewer particularly
objects to the disqualification of Shakespeare’s Stratford
monument and inscription, and the testimony in the First Folio as
evidence of Shakespeare’s career as a writer.

This reviewer implies that I
summarily dismiss the testimony in the First Folio. My
analysis of this testimony comprises all of chapter 10 and
part of chapter 11. The reviewer implies that I likewise
summarily dismiss the matter of Shakespeare’s tomb and
inscription, a subject with which chapter 9 is exclusively
concerned.

The disqualification, on the
basis of dates, of documentation and testimony as evidence of
a literary career is applied rigorously to all the writers in
the comparative analysis. Shakespeare is the only individual
for whom historians must rely on posthumous evidence (in the
First Folio) to make their case for a career as a writer.
Every other writer meets the criteria quite easily. Similarly,
biographers rely on ambiguous or impersonal evidence to make
their case for the authorship attribution to Shakespeare, and
again, Shakespeare is the only writer for whom this stretch
is necessary.
The reviewer is apparently
content to give equal weight to hearsay. I rather agree
instead with Prof. Stanley Wells, who wrote: “Oral
tradition is notoriously unreliable, but cannot be definitely
disproved, while Schoenbaum may be right to dismiss it.…
What is surely clear is that it belongs to a different
category of evidence from that which can be documentarily
supported” (“Shakespeare’s Lives: 1991-1994”
in
Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, p. 19).
In addition, as I point out in
various places in the book, praise of Shakespeare as a great
writer is not necessarily identification of the man from
Stratford as that writer. If I postulate that “Shakespeare”
was recognized as a pen name by Elizabethan critics, then a
reference by a critic to “Shakespeare’s fine filed
phrase” is good evidence that the critic thought that
Shakespeare, whoever he was, wrote good poetry. But the
allusion can refer to Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, or
to the name on a title page that was recognized as
representing some other author.
One cannot draw personal
conclusions from impersonal evidence without corroborating
documentation. It is interesting that I was impressed with
this distinction when studying the biographical records of
other writers. In most cases, historians have been careful to
conclude only as much as the evidence permits. It is in the
Shakespearean biography that I see historians breaking their
own rules in order to support the traditional attribution.

At the risk of becoming tedious,
I would quote an eminent historian and biographer, Mark
Eccles, who contributed an article to
The Huntington Library Quarterly
entitled
“A Biographical Dictionary of Elizabethan Authors”
in 1942, when he was engaged in a research project to
supersede the Dictionary of National Biography.
He considered a new
Dictionary “desirable in three respects: thoroughness in
searching for evidence, accuracy in presenting evidence, and
determination to go to first-hand sources wherever possible
instead of repeating information at secondhand” (282).
He added that a biography “must also go back to the
original evidence for every statement it makes, instead of
resting content with information taken from secondary sources”
(284). My own research plan for Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography
attempted to
follow these guidelines. Eccles advised any biographer to
test every single link in the chain of evidence, and even
cautioned the researcher to “be sure that the person
mentioned [in print] is the author and not someone else
bearing the name” (301). It is discouraging to find a
reviewer criticizing me for respecting such standards.

This reviewer criticized me for not being
” the dispassionate researcher” I claim to be. She
faults me for arguing that the author was “an aristocrat,
well-read, well-traveled, conversant with the law and other
languages,” whereas I describe Shakespeare of Stratford as
“an uneducated, greedy entrepreneur and moneylender, ready
to take the chance when some nobleman asks him to be the front
man for getting his plays on the stage.”

I do argue that Shakespeare was
numerate and had an incomplete grammar school education from
which he emerged as an uncultured but street-smart
opportunist. His activities as an entrepreneur and
moneylender are documented with hard evidence, and his greedy
attitude is likewise supported by both documentary evidence
and allusions. In countering the traditional portrayal of
Shakespeare as “sweet,” “gentle,” and
self-effacing, I show precisely how orthodox biographers have
manipulated the evidence to manufacture their artificial
construct. I consider such manipulation of evidence
indicative of orthodoxy’s bias, not mine.

She further takes exception to my argument
that “noblemen, because of their rank, were permitted
neither to publish poetry nor to dabble in the theater.”
This reviewer faults me for “faulty logic and lack of
knowledge of the broader social and theatrical milieu of the time
[which] undermine her argument,” and asserts that “nobles
were not prohibited from printing, for example, or from being
known as playwrights. A list of them is available.”

The reviewer mis-stated my
position. I did not argue that aristocrats were “prohibited”
from printing. Of course they were free to print from a legal
standpoint. My argument is that they chose not to publish
certain genres because of a socially imposed “stigma of
print.” Aristocrats did not wish to be perceived as
interested in commercial profit, which was the province of
the commercial class. This stigma of print applied to
frivolous or commercial writing, specifically poetry and
plays for the public stage. The stigma of print did not
affect publication of pious or didactic works, learned
translations, or the like. Aristocrats avoided being
perceived as writing for public consumption by circulating
their “toys” or “trifles” in manuscript
to their circle of friends or associates, rather than
publishing. These distinctions and supporting evidence are
covered in chapter 12.
It’s unfortunate that this
reviewer did not specify which “list” of published
aristocrats she has in mind, but I would guess that any of
those whom she might name were either victims of
surreptitious (i.e., unauthorized) publication, or were
authors of “closet dramas,” not intended to be
performed, and more properly categorized as learned
translations or political treatises, genres that were
considered more respectable.

The reviewer faults me for using “a
double standard for evidence. It’s OK if it does not favor
Shakespeare, suspect if it does.”

Any serious analysis requires a
testing of evidence to determine what can be safely concluded.
I do not reject any evidence, favorable or otherwise, left
behind by Shakespeare. On the contrary, I accept all of it,
including some evidence ignored or edited by traditional
biographers. My book describes how I tested the evidence and
what I concluded from it. In that process, I reject many of
traditional conclusions, and provide reasons for that
rejection as well as for my alternatives. That’s not applying
a double standard. That’s applying a consistent standard and
arriving at a different conclusion.

The reviewer argues that “Shakespeare’s
plays do not show more classical learning than could be got from
an Elizabethan grammar school education. The view of court life
in the plays is not that of an insider. As for travel, any decent
writer can acquire enough information secondhand to make a
setting sound authentic (and Shakespeare gets some details about
Europe quite wrong).”

These objections are unsupported
assertions, and are standard issue in traditional biographies.
I challenge each of those assertions with sustained evidence
and argument.

The reviewer concludes by claiming that
“there is not space here to go into disproving all the
points on which Price founds her case, but Shakespeare, in Fact
by Irvin Leigh Matus (Continuum, 1994) and
the website
run by David Kathman and Terry Clark
refute each of them.”

These closing remarks refer the
reader to two sources, which tell me that the reviewer is not
herself well-read on the subject of Shakespeare’s biography.
Matus’s book is largely a refutation of the case as argued by
Oxfordians, and those sections in his book are, for the most
part, irrelevant to my case. However, Matus does raise many
good questions about anti-Stratfordian arguments; some I
agree with, some not. (I take issue with him in chapter 5.)
His book, which was published six years ago, did not
anticipate the new arguments I present in mine, so it cannot
be useful in refuting the new case that I’ve made.
The Shakespeare Authorship web
site contains much useful information and provides excellent
links to other sites, but as of the date of this review,
Mssrs. Kathman and Ross had not yet posted any specific
criticisms of my book. So it is unreasonable for the reviewer
to suggest that everything in my book is refuted by them.

Comparative analysis and interpretation of
Groatsworth of Wit and Vertue’s Commonwealth
(pp. 54-56); and

Analysis of Jonson’s “De
Shakespeare Nostrati” and the significance of Jonson’s
classical source (pp. 196-209). There are several other
“nuggets” throughout the book that I have not found
in any other Shakespearean biography.

Diana Price uses
the tools of modern literary theory to deconstruct contemporary
references to Shakespeare.

My book is a re-construction, rather than a deconstruction, of
the biography of Shakespeare, based on the evidence.
Specifically, it is a challenge to the documentary biography
of Shakespeare, not to literary theories about Shakespeare. I
have taken into account the evidence used by biographers (principally
Schoenbaum, Chambers, Honigmann, Bentley, Lewis, Lee, Honan,
Kay, Chute, and Bradbrook), analyzed how they have used or
considered evidence, and evaluated their reasons and
conclusions. When I take issue with their reasoning or with
their conclusions, I offer alternatives and my own reasoning.
My book is not an exercise in, nor dependent upon any sort of
literary theory.

On the surface,
this evidence straightforwardly attributes the famous plays and
poems to an actor from Stratford-on-Avon.

This is the very premise
that I challenge throughout the book. To pre-suppose that
this evidence of attribution is “straightforward”
is to employ circular reasoning.

Miss Price will
have none of that. She searches for ambiguity and coded meanings,
predictably finds them, and thus feels justified in substituting
an implausible scenario, supported by no positive evidence at all,
for Shakespeare’s orthodox biography.

If the reviewer does not
find any ambiguities in places where I do, that is his
interpretation. However, he is ignoring the numerous orthodox
critics whom I cite, both Shakespearean and Jonsonian, who
have likewise found ambiguities in the allusions.

Among the positive
evidence that I cite to support the unorthodox Shakespeare is
his prominent position in the theatrical documentation, the
passage from Vertue’s Commonwealth
reinforcing my interpretation of Groatsworth of Wit, and the documentary records of
Shakespeare bearing on and reinforcing his financial
interests and skills (such as the Quiney letter, Shakespeare’s
will, his various real estate investments, etc.) The
comparative analysis of literary paper trails shows the
absence of evidence supporting the statement “Shakespeare
was a writer.”

Her thesis, in
brief, is that William “Shakspere” of Stratford was an
actor, theatrical investor and moneylender - but not a writer.
Among his activities were arranging the printing of, and taking
credit for, other men’s plays. One of his victims was an
anonymous nobleman, a supplier of scripts to the acting company
with which Shakspere was associated. This author - just by
coincidence - had adopted “William Shakespeare” as a
pen name for his published poems, “Venus and Adonis”
and “The Rape of Lucrece”.

I do not argue that the
author “just by coincidence” adopted “William
Shakespeare as a pen name. I outline several scenarios and
conditions, among which I propose is to be found the point of
intersection between the name “William Shakespeare”
as representing an unnamed aristocratic author in print, and
the name of “William Shakespeare,” the man from
Stratford. In particular, the allusions to “Battillus”
and the precedent in the case of Terence, bears on the “coincidence”
of the pseudonym and the name of the man from Stratford.

When his
pseudonym’s namesake expropriated his works, he could not
complain, because identification as a writer for the popular
stage would have led to social stigmatization. The literary world
was conscious of the imposture, however, and Miss Price finds the
truth hidden in many a coded epigram, including the dedicatory
poems to the First Folio.

For readers who are
familiar only with the unfortunate theories about Great
Cryptograms and other mystical ciphers proposed by some anti-Stratfordians,
the above criticism may set off alarm bells. I do not argue
that there are “codes” waiting only for a decoder
ring to reveal their secrets. Rather, I argue that ambiguity
is present in the prefatory material in the First Folio,
and I support that argument with
citations from numerous Jonsonian critics. Nor do I claim to
“find the truth,” since that implies that I have
solved the entire mystery and identified who wrote the works
of Shakespeare. I claim to find sufficient ambiguity to cast
doubt on the traditional attribution. I demonstrate that the
First Folio material is not the
straightforward testimony it is purported to be in
traditional biography, and further demonstrate that because
it is replete with ambiguous statements, its evidentiary
value as “proof” of Shakespeare of Stratford’s
authorship is questionable. I also show that allusions to
Shakespeare collectively reflect ambiguity, whereas allusions
to other writers of the day are often straightforward.

Like many
creators of alternative Shakespeares, Miss Price seems to bear a
grudge against the claimant from Stratford.

I have no grudge against
Shakespeare, but his contemporaries did, and I report that
without apology. Much of the evidence for Shakespeare is
unflattering (including Groatsworth,
the 1598 grain hoarding record, the warrant for arrest with
Langley, the last will, the notes concerning his position
regarding the Welcombe enclosures). It is interesting that
this reviewer did not mention the passages in my book where I
expose outright bias or distortion in the orthodox biographer’s
treatment of evidence.

Her account of
his career is jaundiced to a high degree, and she sees him as the
figure behind practically every Elizabethan lampoon of braggart
actors, plagiarizing poets or unscrupulous impresarios.

Nearly every satire or
lampoon in which I identify Shakespeare as the target
has been identified by orthodox scholars. I cite them when I
introduce the satires.

“Facts”
collected from such caricatures form much of the basis of her
reconstruction of “Shakspere’s” life, though the
probability that they actually allude to him is generally small.
For example, she is confident that the buffoon Sogliardo in Ben
Jonson’s “Every Man Out of His Humour” is a hit on
Shakspere. She does not note that the play was written for the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men, of which the Stratford man was a
principal shareholder. One somehow doubts that Shakspere was so
tolerant as to finance a parody of himself.

The
Sogliardo lampoon is not a particularly good example of an
improbable satire of Shakespeare. It was first noticed as a
“hit’ at Shakespeare by orthodox scholars and is
cited by many biographers. Using that identification as a
starting point, I extended the analysis.

To animus is
joined partial scholarship. The author has read extensively but
declines to confront evidence or analysis inconsistent with her
views. To take a few instances:

The “stigma
of print” is vital to her case, as it furnishes her sole
explanation of why not only the noble author, but also every
other contemporary, failed to unmask “Shakspere” as a
fraud. In fact, this stigma was supposedly so powerful that the
editors of the First Folio kept up the pretense after both
Shakspere and the real playwright (who, Miss Price believes, died
before 1609) were gone from the world.

But was there
any such stigma? Steven May, the leading authority on the
literary works of Tudor courtiers, lambasted the theory in “Tudor
Aristocrats and the Mythical ’Stigma of Print’” (Renaissance
Papers, 1980). Miss Price takes no notice of this article.
Conceivably she overlooked it, but her bibliography does list
Professor May’s book “The Elizabethan Courtier Poets”,
which contains ample evidence that aristocrats of the era had no
qualms about seeing their literary works, including their plays,
in print under their own names.

I have read Prof. May’s
article, and it has been on David Kathman’s Shakespeare
Authorship Web page for some time. I do not view Prof. May’s
article on this subject as the final word, nor do I agree
with it entirely. Nor do the authorities whom I cite
concerning the conception of a “stigma of print.”

More to the point, the
evidence that I cite in support of a “stigma of print”
is, in my view, sufficiently strong as to leave the reader
with no doubt that just such a social convention existed as
an effective restraint in Shakespeare’s day. I would
question Prof. May’s conclusion specifically on two
counts. One, the very evidence that he cites to demonstrate
how the “myth of the stigma of print” was first
postulated is, in my view, evidence proving, not disproving,
the “stigma of print.” (Among that evidence is the
testimony found in The Arte of English Poesie, which I also cite.) Second,
while May argues that there was more of a “stigma of
verse” than a “stigma of print,” I would
respond by suggesting that he does not sufficiently
distinguish between genres, in particular the genres of
poetry (considered “literary trifles”) and plays
written for the commercial stage, as distinct from the more
serious, pious, or didactic works and translations, which
were published with less restraint and/or less apology by the
upper classes. Again, please refer to the works by Arthur
Marotti and Richard Helgerson (see my fn. p 218).

Miss Price
thinks that the real Shakespeare was dead by 1609, because the
publisher’s dedication to the Sonnets refers to “our ever-living
poet”. She cites Don Foster’s article, “Master W.H., R.I.P.”,
to prove that the adjective “ever-living” was not
customarily applied to people who were still alive. She does not
cite the article’s conclusion: that “ever-living” is
applied most frequently to God, the “ever-living poet”
Who is asked to bless the (living) sonneteer.

The reviewer has
proposed an alternative reading to the dedication to the
Sonnets. I have proposed mine.

Miss Price
derides the notion that Shakespeare could have acquired classical
and literary knowledge through private reading. Yet Ben Jonson
did precisely that. Jonson’s works are vastly more erudite than
Shakespeare’s, but his formal education did not go beyond a few
years of grammar school.

Historians are able to
trace at least part of Jonson’s education through his
two explicit tributes to his mentor, William Camden. Jonson
received an honorary degree from Oxford University noting
that he was “happily versed in all humane literature”
(Riggs, 262). For Shakespeare, there are no comparable
records.

Moreover, Jonson
pursued his independent studies in the face of dire poverty,
whereas Shakespeare of Stratford appears always to have been at
least modestly affluent (besides which, a family friend was one
of London’s most important booksellers). The facts about Jonson’s
self-education are set forth in a book cited several times by
Miss Price in other contexts (David Riggs, “Ben Jonson: A
Life”, pp. 57-58).

This criticism only underscores my point. If Shakespeare had the
means and the access to educational and cultural
opportunities, why aren’t there any paper trails to
trace his progress as a developing writer, as we can trace
Jonson’s? This reviewer hardly mentioned the argument in
my book that I consider the strongest: the comparative
analysis of evidence supporting the literary biographies of
Shakespeare and two dozen of his contemporaries. I found
personal literary paper trails for everyone except
Shakespeare.

To buttress her
contention that Shakespeare left no “literary paper trail”,
Miss Price states flatly that no manuscripts in his hand survive.
As a student of Elizabethan literature, she is surely aware of
the famous “Sir Thomas More” manuscript, a portion of
which is widely believed to be Shakespeare’s autograph. That
belief may, of course, be mistaken, but it should be refuted with
arguments rather than silence.

The reviewer must have missed my reference (p. 127, also listed
in the index) to the possibility that Hand D in Sir Thomas More is that of Shakespeare.

The reviewer, in introducing the pages from
Sir Thomas More
as possibly being in Shakespeare’s hand, tacitly acknowledges the deficiency
of personal literary paper trails in Shakespeare’s
traditional biography. As the reviewer seems to be aware, the
evidence for Shakespeare’s as “Hand D” in the
manuscript of Sir Thomas More is inconclusive.
I note in passing that Anthony Holden identified -- without
qualification -- the facsimile of a page of
Sir Thomas More
as the only fragment of a manuscript in Shakespeare’s handwriting (
William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius. A Biography.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1999).

Any reader who
is impressed by Miss Price’s facade of scholarship should bear
omissions like these in mind. Consciously or not, she has
fashioned a brief for a preconceived opinion, not a fair-minded
evaluation of facts and circumstances. She is less incoherent
than Charlton Ogburn, Jr., and less bizarrely speculative (but
also less entertaining) than Joseph Sobran, but her case against
the Stratford man, like theirs, amounts to nothing more
substantial than bile and overheated air.

The Review of English Studies (RES)
occasionally recommends previously published articles in
their “Instructions to Authors” as a model to
follow in terms of Style. The RES
has cited my article (“Reconsidering Shakespeare’s
Monument,” May 1997) several times in such “Instructions.”
I expect if the editors of this highly respected journal
considered my article merely a “facade of scholarship,”
they would not have accepted it in the first place, much less
recommended it to prospective contributors.

Finally, I should be grateful if the reviewer would direct
my attention to the particular pages on which he finds
“bile and overheated air,”
since he did not specify which passages gave offense.

Following is the AUTHOR’S RESPONSE (indented) to the same reader’s review (PART 2) posted on Amazon.com
(www.amazon.com.)

PART 2. A Correction, January 18, 2001

Reviewer: Edward Thomas Veal from Chicago, Illinois USA

Diana Price has complained on her website that the last
bullet point in my earlier review ignored her “reference
(p. 127, also listed in the index) to the possibility that
Hand D in Sir Thomas More is that of Shakespeare”.
Though my oversight was inadvertent, she is correct. By way
of atonement, I reproduce in its entirety what “Shakespeare’s
Unorthodox Biography” says about Sir Thomas More and
Hand D:

The poor quality of Shakspere’s penmanship is as
suspicious as is the paucity of extant handwriting for a man
who supposedly lived by the pen, and scholars continue to
search for more specimens. Some have pored over manuscript
pages of the play Sir Thomas More, hoping to find Shakspere’s
handwriting in it. Yet there remain only six inconsistent,
blotchy signatures against which to make any comparisons. At
best, the six signatures support the conclusion that
Shakspere could sign or at least scrawl his name, but they do
not support the conclusion that he was a professional writer.

A reader will not learn here that scholars have assembled
an impressive (though not uncontroverted) body of evidence in
support of the identification of “Hand D” with that
of William Shakespeare. I’m sorry that I overlooked this
passage, because it neatly illustrates my main point: Time
and again, Miss Price, instead of seeking to refute
inconvenient analyses, pretends that they don’t exist. I
noted a few examples in my review.

If I wanted to pretend that the case for “Hand
D” in Sir Thomas More case
did not exist, I would not have mentioned it in my book.
However, the reader’s criticism is that I did not offer a
more complete discussion of the relative merits and
demerits of the case for “Hand D” as Shakspere’s.
In retrospect, I have to agree with him. [Update March 2016: I’ve addressed this subject
in my research paper on the Sir Thomas More manuscript, titled
“Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail,” which was
published in the Journal of Early Modern Studies,
Jems 5
(University of Florence, 2016), online
here.]

If Amazon allotted infinite space to reviewers, I could add more,
as well as describe other departures from scholarly practice.
(One of my favorite instances: George Chalmers, an eccentric
defender of William Henry Ireland’s Shakespearean forgeries,
is cited as a sound “orthodox” authority (p. 93)!
Curiously, though Miss Price relies on him, she doesn’t list
his work in her bibliography.)

I mention Chalmers as a critic with whom an
early Jonsonian editor, William Gifford, takes
issue. (Chalmers is the orthodox critic who
proposed Shakespeare as the target of Jonson’s
“Poet-Ape.”) Gifford’s work, which
I quote, is duly listed in the bibliography.
Gifford shares the reader’s opinion of
Chalmers as an unreliable critic. After citing
Gifford’s outrage at Chalmers’s proposal, I go on
to present my own reasons for accepting
Shakespeare as the target of the allusion.

The anti-Stratfordians who have rallied around Miss Price’s book
should ponder whether gaining converts through the tactic of
suppressio veri is a good long-run strategy. Their cause
would be far better served by an author who was willing to
confront, rather than shut her eyes to and sneer at, the
other side of the case.

The identity of the reviewer on Amazon from Santa
Fe is unknown to me, but from his or her comments,
that reader was not pre-disposed to an anti-Stratfordian
position. So it is not necessarily committed “anti-Stratfordians
who have rallied around” my book. That reader
describes his/herself as someone with an open mind
who was persuaded by rational argument. And on a
point of semantics, I do not consider the anti-Stratfordian
position a “cause.” Nor am I looking for
“converts.” I consider the authorship
question essentially an academic issue that requires
critical analysis and further research if it is to be
resolved.

The Naked Shakespeare, a documentary by Claus Bredenbrock, Florian Film Group (ARTE, various European venues)

University of Tennessee Law School (CLE symposium)

Cosmos Club, Washington, D.C.

DACOR, Newberry Lecture Series, Washington, D.C.

WETA (NPR) radio, “The Program,”
Washington, D.C.

Cleveland State University, Dept. of English

John Carroll University, Cleveland, Dept. of
Communication and Language Arts

North Carolina Shakespeare Festival

California State University, Los Angeles

University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Dept. of
English

Griffith University, Brisbane

University of the Third Age, Brisbane

English-Speaking Union, Greensboro chapter

Rotary Clubs of Downey and Redondo Beach, CA

Kiwanis Club of Starmount, NC

Lakewood Public Library, Lakewood,OH

University School, Cleveland

College Club of Cleveland

Greensboro Public Library (NC)

“Chautauqua Books,” Ch. 5, Chautauqua, NY

WJTN Radio, Jamestown, NY

Rose Institute for Life Long Learning, Beachwood, OH

Borders Books & Music, various northern Ohio
locations

Barnes & Noble, Greensboro

WFDD-FM (NPR), Greensboro

Ch. 8 Fox news, Greensboro

WKYC-TV news, Cleveland

WCPN (NPR) Radio

Australian Broadcasting Co. “Nightlife”
(radio)

Rotary Clubs of Cleveland, OH; Rockville, MD

Judge, English-Speaking Union Shakespeare
Competition

Joseph-Beth Booksellers & Cafe, Cleveland

Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland

Shakespearean Research Symposium I & II. Los
Angeles; Detroit

Lorain County Community College, Dept. of Liberal
Studies. Elyria, OH

Shakespeare Authorship Trust (UK) & Brunel University

WCPN (NPR) radio “The Sound of Applause”

Delta Kappa Gamma, Cleveland, OH

Judson Manor & Judson Retirement Community,
Cleveland, OH

Your group or forum can schedule presentations by the author on the following topics:

1. New Evidence of a Shakespeare Authorship Problem

For audiences with a general
interest in the subject, the author offers an overview of
the questions and issues raised in her book,
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.

2. Shakespeare and Documentary Evidence

This three-part lecture series (with slides) is ideal for
anyone interested in Shakespeare, critical thinking,
literature, history, and specifically Shakespeare’s
authorship. Is The Shakespeare Authorship Question a
crackpot issue  or a real problem that the orthodox
would prefer to sweep under the carpet? This analysis of
literary evidence for Elizabethan writers is both
entertaining and instructive, and is bound to make you
more skeptical. You'll be surprised to learn that both
sides of the Shakespeare authorship issue have advanced
bad arguments or fiddled with the evidence. Which side
has made the better case? These lectures encourage you to
decide for yourself. Whether you are considering
Shakespeare’s authorship or some other controversial
topic, these lectures can help you to question what the
authorities tell you  and to test the evidence
yourself. Running times: approximately 40-50 minutes each.

Part 1Primary Evidence for a Literary Biography

What is primary evidence? The
author examines types of documentation that underpin
literary biographies. She investigates primary evidence
for Shakespeare and several of his contemporaries.

Part 2Secondary Sources: Can you trust them?

The author questions the experts.
She analyzes specific issues as reported by Shakespearean
scholars as well as those who have challenged the
traditional biography, to determine whether the
conclusions are supported by the primary evidence.

Part 3Shakespeare and his Contemporaries:A Comparative Investigation.

Is Shakespeare the odd man out? The author rounds up primary
evidence for Shakespeare, and two dozen of his
contemporaries, including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe,
and Edmund Spenser. She compares the quality of evidence
used to support each of the respective literary
biographies, and her results are surprising.

Responding
to the claim that “we have no paper trail of Shakespeare as a playwright
or poet, no correspondence, manuscripts, personal library or ephemera,"
David Kathman writes:

By “paper trail” I assume
you mean the things you mention - “correspondence, manuscripts,
personal library, or ephemera.” Actually, we do have one letter
written to Shakespeare by his townsman Richard Quiney, and a book
(William Lambarde’s Archaionomia) with a signature that is
now widely, but not universally, accepted as William Shakespeare’s.
[dead link] (Kathman, HLAS, 7 March 2002)

A letter written to Shakespeare by Quiney, a Stratford man in search of
financing, is hardly evidence that Shakespeare was a writer, so we move
immediately to Kathman’s claim for Shakespeare’s signature in the Lambarde
book. If the signature were genuine, it would not only count as the seventh
authenticated signature, it would effectively put a book in Shakespeare’s hand
and qualify as a “personal literary paper trail.”

On his website in his section on
Hand D, Kathman
directs readers to Giles Dawson’s 1992 article,
“A Seventh Signature for Shakespeare.” In a message to the
“Shaksper"
discussion group on 19 June 1995, Kathman cited some
authorities concerning “the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of
William Lambarde’s Archaionomia, a treatise on Anglo-Saxon law.

This has a
signature on the title-page which many, many very knowledgeable people believe
to be that of William Shakespeare. I will
not attempt to summarize the evidence here, but it is summarized by
Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: Records and Images
(1981), and by Giles Dawson in an article he wrote for
Shakespeare Quarterly a few years ago
(1992?), a couple of years before his death.
Schoenbaum, a notorious skeptic,
believes that the signature is more likely to be genuine than not (and for him,
that’s saying a lot), and Dawson believed flat-out that the signature is
genuine. I think the evidence is pretty persuasive; if the signature was
forged, the forger was one of the best ever.

This information provides a place to start, and I begin by inquiring how Mr. Kathman
would quantify his phrases “many, many very knowledgeable people,"
and “widely, but not universally accepted.” If the alleged seventh
signature is “widely” accepted, we should expect to find numerous
“very knowledgeable” authorities quoting it as evidence after the
initial reports of its discovery in 1942, and only a few hold-outs. What we
find, however, are a few lone voices of acceptance, versus “wide"
non-acceptance.

The Folger acquired the
Lambarde book in 1938 and it was examined by Giles Dawson, James
McManaway, and Edwin E. Willoughby. Scholarship has therefore had
the opportunity to examine, question, accept, or reject, the
signature in Archaionomia
since 1942, when Dawson reported his findings and Joseph Quincy
Adams published on the subject. Both accepted the signature as genuine. Very
few subsequently followed their lead, and the subject dropped out of sight for
awhile.

In 1973, W. Nicholas Knight
rekindled the subject and got some media attention with his book,
Shakespeare’s Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595.
The signature in Archaionomia
was one of his principal “new” pieces of
evidence. The appearance of Knight’s book prompted comments concerning not only
his disqualification as one of Kathman’s “knowledgeable people” but also
the genuineness of the signature.

N.W. Bawcutt, for example, criticizes Knight’s “use of evidence [as]
surprisingly careless. … Even if we accept that the Lambarde signature is
genuine,” it does not support Knight’s additional claims (164-65).
So Bawcutt does not seize the opportunity to accept the signature as genuine.

In the Shakespeare Quarterly review, R.J. Schoeck criticized “Knight’s lack of
scholarly objectivity” and arguments built on “a host of
assumptions,” including the Archaionomia
signature, a signature
“known to Shakespearean scholars for three decades … [and] blown up into
’this new fact about Shakespeare’s private life’” (305-7).

In his review in
Renaissance Quarterly,
Ronald Berman commends Knight’s “fine
detective work on the authentication of Shakespeare’s signature” but has
very little else good to say:

The question of
Shakespeare’s autograph is clearly stated in a fact sheet
assembled by the Folger Library on William Lambarde’s
Archaionomia
(1568). Professor
Knight has attempted to identify a signature in that book as that of William
Shakespeare. Current scholarly opinion on the matter is summarized by the
Folger in purely descriptive terms: no ascription has at this time been
generally accepted. (99)

In his
1992 article, Giles Dawson argues that there “is an overwhelming
probability that the writer of all seven signatures was the same person"
(79). But there is no proof that even the first six signatures were written by
the same person, since Jane Cox has argued, and Jonathan Hope has recently
reminded us all (on the Shaksper news group), that some of the allegedly genuine
signatures on Shakespeare’s will may not be that of the testator:

At the risk of appearing
willfully mischievous, could I point out that the authenticity of
the signatures on the will is not certain. David Thomas’
Shakespeare in the Public Records
(1985: Public Record Office), page 34, notes
that signatures were often ’supplied’ in a different hand from their own by the
scribe - wills were proved by executor’s oath not by the signature. (Hope, Feb.
27, 2002)

As for the “wide” acceptance
of the seventh signature by recent biographers, Park Honan doesn’t
mention it. Neither does Duncan-Jones. In his discussion of Hand D,
Dennis Kay notes that “the only other examples of his hand are six
[emphasis added] signatures” (180). In his biography of Shakespeare,
Schoenbaum (Compact, 215) compares Hand D to “the six
[emphasis added] authenticated signatures,” and he was writing years
after Dawson’s and Adams’s articles. The Reader’s Encyclopedia
describes the signature as “disputed.”

Another place to seek the
extent of “wide” or scant acceptance is in discussions of
Shakespeare’s possible handwriting in Sir Thomas More.
Numerous scholars have revisited the Hand D arguments subsequent to
the proposed addition of a seventh signature to the control sample
of handwriting. R.C. Bald, writing seven years after Dawson’s
initial report, accepts “only six signatures” in the control sample
(54). I.A. Shapiro likewise refers to six signatures, and Michael L.
Hays doesn’t mention the Archaionomia signature.

So where are all the
authorities who justify Kathman’s claim that there is “wide
acceptance” among “many, many” authorities of the signature in
Archaionomia. The group would seem to consist of Giles
Dawson, Joseph Quincy Adams, Hereward T. Price (per Schoenbaum,
Records, 107n, who describes
H.T. Price’s paper as “special pleading"), and David Kathman.

It is
possible that, by unhappy chance as I checked through articles on Hand D,
recent biographies, and relevant articles, I have unintentionally missed all
the “very knowledgeable” scholars who accept this signature. At the
least, the seventh signature has not permeated Shakespearian scholarship to any
significant degree, as far as I have been able to ascertain. On the contrary,
it has been roundly ignored.

Kathman cites Schoenbaum as
believing “that the signature is more likely to be genuine than
not.” But Schoenbaum’s discussion appears in a section subtitled
“Doubtful and Spurious Signatures” in Records and Images.
Schoenbaum concludes that Dawson “thinks there is a better chance
that the signature is genuine than that it is not. That strikes
[Schoenbaum] as a fair statement of the position. Handwriting
analysis alone cannot resolve the question, and it seems unlikely,
so long after the event, that evidence of another sort will be
forthcoming. The Lambarde signature makes a better claim to
authenticity than any other pretended Shakespeare autograph, but it
is premature, to say the least, to classify it as the poet’s seventh
signature” [emphasis added] (Records, 109).

Mr. Kathman’s claim that this
signature is “widely accepted” by “many, many” people as the poet’s
seventh signature, is likewise premature.

Responding
to the claim that “we have no paper trail of Shakespeare as a playwright
or poet, no correspondence, manuscripts, personal library or ephemera,"
David Kathman writes:

By “paper trail” I assume
you mean the things you mention - “correspondence, manuscripts,
personal library, or ephemera.” Actually, we do have one letter
written to Shakespeare by his townsman Richard Quiney, and a book
(William Lambarde’s Archaionomia) with a signature that is
now widely, but not universally, accepted as William Shakespeare’s.
[dead link] (Kathman, HLAS, 7 March 2002)

A letter written to Shakespeare by Quiney, a Stratford man in search of
financing, is hardly evidence that Shakespeare was a writer, so we move
immediately to Kathman’s claim for Shakespeare’s signature in the Lambarde
book. If the signature were genuine, it would not only count as the seventh
authenticated signature, it would effectively put a book in Shakespeare’s hand
and qualify as a “personal literary paper trail.”

On his website in his section on
Hand D, Kathman
directs readers to Giles Dawson’s 1992 article,
“A Seventh Signature for Shakespeare.” In a message to the
“Shaksper"
discussion group on 19 June 1995, Kathman cited some
authorities concerning “the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of
William Lambarde’s Archaionomia, a treatise on Anglo-Saxon law.

This has a
signature on the title-page which many, many very knowledgeable people believe
to be that of William Shakespeare. I will
not attempt to summarize the evidence here, but it is summarized by
Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: Records and Images
(1981), and by Giles Dawson in an article he wrote for
Shakespeare Quarterly a few years ago
(1992?), a couple of years before his death.
Schoenbaum, a notorious skeptic,
believes that the signature is more likely to be genuine than not (and for him,
that’s saying a lot), and Dawson believed flat-out that the signature is
genuine. I think the evidence is pretty persuasive; if the signature was
forged, the forger was one of the best ever.

This information provides a place to start, and I begin by inquiring how Mr. Kathman
would quantify his phrases “many, many very knowledgeable people,"
and “widely, but not universally accepted.” If the alleged seventh
signature is “widely” accepted, we should expect to find numerous
“very knowledgeable” authorities quoting it as evidence after the
initial reports of its discovery in 1942, and only a few hold-outs. What we
find, however, are a few lone voices of acceptance, versus “wide"
non-acceptance.

The Folger acquired the
Lambarde book in 1938 and it was examined by Giles Dawson, James
McManaway, and Edwin E. Willoughby. Scholarship has therefore had
the opportunity to examine, question, accept, or reject, the
signature in Archaionomia
since 1942, when Dawson reported his findings and Joseph Quincy
Adams published on the subject. Both accepted the signature as genuine. Very
few subsequently followed their lead, and the subject dropped out of sight for
awhile.

In 1973, W. Nicholas Knight
rekindled the subject and got some media attention with his book,
Shakespeare’s Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595.
The signature in Archaionomia
was one of his principal “new” pieces of
evidence. The appearance of Knight’s book prompted comments concerning not only
his disqualification as one of Kathman’s “knowledgeable people” but also
the genuineness of the signature.

N.W. Bawcutt, for example, criticizes Knight’s “use of evidence [as]
surprisingly careless. … Even if we accept that the Lambarde signature is
genuine,” it does not support Knight’s additional claims (164-65).
So Bawcutt does not seize the opportunity to accept the signature as genuine.

In the Shakespeare Quarterly review, R.J. Schoeck criticized “Knight’s lack of
scholarly objectivity” and arguments built on “a host of
assumptions,” including the Archaionomia
signature, a signature
“known to Shakespearean scholars for three decades … [and] blown up into
’this new fact about Shakespeare’s private life’” (305-7).

In his review in
Renaissance Quarterly,
Ronald Berman commends Knight’s “fine
detective work on the authentication of Shakespeare’s signature” but has
very little else good to say:

The question of
Shakespeare’s autograph is clearly stated in a fact sheet
assembled by the Folger Library on William Lambarde’s
Archaionomia
(1568). Professor
Knight has attempted to identify a signature in that book as that of William
Shakespeare. Current scholarly opinion on the matter is summarized by the
Folger in purely descriptive terms: no ascription has at this time been
generally accepted. (99)

In his
1992 article, Giles Dawson argues that there “is an overwhelming
probability that the writer of all seven signatures was the same person"
(79). But there is no proof that even the first six signatures were written by
the same person, since Jane Cox has argued, and Jonathan Hope has recently
reminded us all (on the Shaksper news group), that some of the allegedly genuine
signatures on Shakespeare’s will may not be that of the testator:

At the risk of appearing
willfully mischievous, could I point out that the authenticity of
the signatures on the will is not certain. David Thomas’
Shakespeare in the Public Records
(1985: Public Record Office), page 34, notes
that signatures were often ’supplied’ in a different hand from their own by the
scribe - wills were proved by executor’s oath not by the signature. (Hope, Feb.
27, 2002)

As for the “wide” acceptance
of the seventh signature by recent biographers, Park Honan doesn’t
mention it. Neither does Duncan-Jones. In his discussion of Hand D,
Dennis Kay notes that “the only other examples of his hand are six
[emphasis added] signatures” (180). In his biography of Shakespeare,
Schoenbaum (Compact, 215) compares Hand D to “the six
[emphasis added] authenticated signatures,” and he was writing years
after Dawson’s and Adams’s articles. The Reader’s Encyclopedia
describes the signature as “disputed.”

Another place to seek the
extent of “wide” or scant acceptance is in discussions of
Shakespeare’s possible handwriting in Sir Thomas More.
Numerous scholars have revisited the Hand D arguments subsequent to
the proposed addition of a seventh signature to the control sample
of handwriting. R.C. Bald, writing seven years after Dawson’s
initial report, accepts “only six signatures” in the control sample
(54). I.A. Shapiro likewise refers to six signatures, and Michael L.
Hays doesn’t mention the Archaionomia signature.

So where are all the
authorities who justify Kathman’s claim that there is “wide
acceptance” among “many, many” authorities of the signature in
Archaionomia. The group would seem to consist of Giles
Dawson, Joseph Quincy Adams, Hereward T. Price (per Schoenbaum,
Records, 107n, who describes
H.T. Price’s paper as “special pleading"), and David Kathman.

It is
possible that, by unhappy chance as I checked through articles on Hand D,
recent biographies, and relevant articles, I have unintentionally missed all
the “very knowledgeable” scholars who accept this signature. At the
least, the seventh signature has not permeated Shakespearian scholarship to any
significant degree, as far as I have been able to ascertain. On the contrary,
it has been roundly ignored.

Kathman cites Schoenbaum as
believing “that the signature is more likely to be genuine than
not.” But Schoenbaum’s discussion appears in a section subtitled
“Doubtful and Spurious Signatures” in Records and Images.
Schoenbaum concludes that Dawson “thinks there is a better chance
that the signature is genuine than that it is not. That strikes
[Schoenbaum] as a fair statement of the position. Handwriting
analysis alone cannot resolve the question, and it seems unlikely,
so long after the event, that evidence of another sort will be
forthcoming. The Lambarde signature makes a better claim to
authenticity than any other pretended Shakespeare autograph, but it
is premature, to say the least, to classify it as the poet’s seventh
signature” [emphasis added] (Records, 109).

Mr. Kathman’s claim that this
signature is “widely accepted” by “many, many” people as the poet’s
seventh signature, is likewise premature.

1. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy
is a collection
of essays that purports to put an end to the so-called Shakespeare Authorship
Question, once and for all. Its editors, Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson,
recruited 20 contributors, most of whom also contributed to the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust’s “60 Minutes with Shakespeare,”
a project that provided 60 seconds each to 60 scholars addressing various
topics, most with significance for the authorship question.

The essay collection was prompted in part by the
release of Roland Emmerich’s 2011 film Anonymous (a box office flop dramatizing
a fringe version of a “royal birth” theory positing the earl of Oxford as the
real Shakespeare) and the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” (now signed by over
2,700 individuals) published on the website Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.
The substance of the declaration is, in some measure, based on the research in
my own book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem.
It was the first book
challenging the traditional biography to be published by a mainstream publisher
in a peer-reviewed series (Greenwood Press, 2001, “Contributions in Drama and
Theatre Studies” no. 94; now revised and published in paperback by
shakespeare-authorship.com, 2012). A major argument in the book is based on a
comparative analysis of documentary evidence left behind by Shakespeare and two
dozen writers active during his lifetime. The results of that analysis demonstrate
that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period
who left behind no evidence that he wrote for a living, or even as a vocation.

At the April 2013 launch of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt in
Stratford-on-Avon, Ros Barber (author of the
prize-winning The Marlowe Papers, a
fictionalized case for Marlowe’s authorship) criticized the editors of the essay
collection for failing to contend with their peer-reviewed opposition. In this
review essay, I focus on particular contributors who defend the traditional biography,
with the hope that my critique will move the debate forward.

As a general comment, it is unfortunate that a
decision on nomenclature was made in this collection to re-label authorship
skeptics as “anti-Shakespeareans,” rather than the more accurately
descriptive “anti- Stratfordians . “Anti-Shakespearean”
is unnecessarily pejorative (and it was a relief to read James Shapiro’s
reversion to the term “anti- Stratfordian” in his
Afterword). Also, in several places, some contributors assert that the
authorship question first emerged, not during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but in
1856-57, when Delia Bacon published her unreadable tome (2, 87, 246). But Miss Bacon was not the first to ask questions
about Shakespeare’s authorship. She was the first to formalize the question. Expressions
of confusion about Shakespeare’s authorship were recorded during Shakespeare’s
lifetime by Thomas Edwards, the Parnassus
authors, Gabriel Harvey, and John Davies of Hereford, among others.

Now to particulars.

ii. Andrew Hadfield is the author of the recent and
well-received biography of Edmund Spenser. Spenser left behind good evidence of
his literary interests and activities, the evidence that I call personal
literary paper trails. These include books exchanged with his friend, Gabriel
Harvey, his handwritten transcription of a Latin poem, and records of his
education. Despite such evidence for Spenser, in his essay “Theorizing
Shakespeare’s authorship,” Hadfield attempts to lower his reader’s expectations
for evidence surviving for writers from the time period, essentially excusing
the absence of literary paper trails for Shakespeare:

Even a superficial trawl through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
will reveal how little we know about many important
figures, making the gaps in the biographical records of Shakespeare seem
typical rather than unusual and therefore in no need of explanation… What
are left are scraps, fragments, and clues in parish registers, court records,
and probate offices” (65, 66).

To which list I would add personal literary paper trails.

Hadfield admits that “there are virtually no
literary remains left behind by Shakespeare” (66), but he also claims that in
that sense, Shakespeare is no different than other writers, such as Henry Chettle,
Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Nashe, among
others (66). While the canons of these writers, like Shakespeare’s, present various
attribution or authenticity problems, unlike Shakespeare, these writers left
behind solid records of their activities as writers. To take one example
(chosen here because Hadfield singled out Nashe in
his 60 seconds contribution to the SBT program), among the personal literary
paper trails for Nashe are an autograph poem from his
days at Cambridge; a record of how much he was rewarded for writing by one of
his patrons, as specified in a letter from Sir George Carey to his wife (the
dedicatee of the pamphlet in question); and a letter to Carey’s servant describing
his difficulties “writing for the stage and for the press.” Despite the
survival of that letter, Hadfield claims that “personal letters did not survive
in an age when paper was scarce and expensive” (64). Yet additional autograph
letters DO survive for, among others, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston,
and Michael Drayton, and all of them
contain reference to literary topics (Price, Unorthodox, 314-18).
There are no comparable records for
Shakespeare, so Hadfield’s claims do not hold up. The deficiency of personal
literary paper trails for a writer from the time period is not an expected or
common phenomenon; the deficiency is unique to Shakespeare.

iii. David Kathman’s essay “Shakespeare
and Warwickshire” attempts to situate Shakespeare in the intellectual and
literary communities in Stratford-on-Avon, investing him with intellectual
credentials in a sort of literacy-by-association. Yet his sections on Shakespeare’s
Stratford associates do nothing to establish Shakespeare as a man interested in
literary matters. Identifying neighbors, such as Richard Quiney
or Abraham Sturley, who read books or wrote letters,
sometimes in Latin, is not evidence that Shakespeare read books or wrote
letters. Indeed, the reason Kathman can state
categorically that Quiney or Sturley
read books or wrote letters is because letters survive to support those
statements (124-27). No comparable evidence survives for Shakespeare.

Kathman claims that the plays “include numerous offhand references to people and places
from the area around stratford” (129). but those “numerous” warwickshire characters
and locations appear in only two plays, Henry IV (2) and The Taming of the Shrew.
He further claims that the plays “are peppered with dialect words from
Warwickshire and the West Midlands” (129). He cites three sources in his endnote,
primarily C.T. Onions, and also R.C. Churchill (actually Ivor Brown’s
introduction) and Hilda M. Hulme . Not only do these
sources fail to verify all his claims, he omits other resources that would compromise
or invalidate several of them. After consulting Joseph Wright’s still valuable
six-volume The English Dialect Dictionary, James Orchard Halliwell’s
Dictionary of Archaic Words, James Appleton Morgan’s Warwickshire Glossary,
and the OED, I would propose that at least five of the nine words Kathman
mentions don’t belong on his list.

For example, Kathman defines a “ballow” as a ‘cudgel,’ which Onions locates in the
north Midlands (12). But the texts of King Lear (IV.vi.238) read, variously, “battero”
(Qq), “bat” (Q1 and Q2), and “ballow” (F), so there is not even a secure basis for
accepting “ballow” as the intended word. The OED elaborates:

Only in the Shakes. Folio of 1623, and subseq . editions, in loc. cit., where the Quartos have battero, and bat (stick, rough walking-stick); besides
which, batton, battoun,
‘stick, cudgel’ obs. f. baton n. (q.v.) is a probable emendation. Bailey (1742)
has ‘ Ballow, a pole, a long stick, quarter-staff,
etc. Shakesp .’ (quoted by Halliwell
as ‘Northern’): but no such word seems to exist, or to have any etymological
justification.

The Arden 2 editor goes with “ballow” and
cites Wright’s entry (1:145) for the word as common to Nottinghamshire (Muir, 173;
Wright also specifies the word as in use in the shire of Kent).
The Arden 3 editor goes with “baton,” rejecting
the Folio reading of “ballow” since he could find “no convincing parallels” (Foakes, 346).

According to Onions, “potch,” meaning
to thrust, “survives in Warwickshire” (165).
Wright lists the word “potch” as a variant form of
“poach” (4:562), defines “poach” (and its variant spellings) as “to poke, esp. with
the fingers; to thrust, push suddenly,” etc., and locates the variant “potch” not only in Warwickshire, but also in Staffordshire,
Shropshire, and Gloucestershire. The Arden 2 editor of Coriolanus glosses potch as “jab, poke”
but is silent on the matter of dialect (Brockbank, 149), as are the editors of recent Oxford and Cambridge editions, as well as Halliwell . Morgan’s Glossary
contains neither “poach” nor “potch .”

The word “batlet,” meaning ‘club (for washing)’ is described by Onions
as “current recently in Yorks [hire] and
Warwick[shire] (13). “Batler” is in the OED with reference to the modified word
“batlet” in modern editions of As You Like It, but no dialect is
mentioned. The word in the Arden 2
edition of As You Like It (II.iv.46) reads “batler .” Halliwell
lists “batler” but does not assign a shire of origin
or use (149). The New Variorum editor
(Knowles, 93) cites [John R.] Wise’s list of Warwickshire words, but also cites
Wright, who specifies Yorkshire and Warwickshire (per Wise’s list) and adds a
disclaimer: “not known to our correspondents in Warwickshire” (1:186). Morgan’s
glossary contains only “batten,” defined as “a stick used in washing clothes”
(76), but provides no examples in the Shakespeare canon.

At least two other words in Kathman’s
list, “pash” and “tarre,” fare
no better. Of the nine dialect words cited by Kathman,
only four may withstand scrutiny. Kathman
acknowledges that while the dialect words that he cites “don’t prove anything,”
they are “consistent” with the Stratford man’s authorship (129). But they are not.
In order to make that case, he would need to
show
(1) that Warwickshire and West Midlands
dialect words are particular to, or better yet, usually exclusive to, those
shires, and
(2) that the Shakespeare
canon contains disproportionately higher numbers of dialect words from those
regions. When a word such as “batlet” is found in
Yorkshire as well as (possibly) Warwickshire, Kathman’s
argument is weakened. It is further diluted as the known use of a word is
discovered in additional shires or regions. It is difficult to give credence to
words that he claims as Warwickshire dialect, even those found in Onions’s Glossary,
when there is no further support or corroboration from Halliwell,
Morgan, the OED, various critical
editions, or especially Wright.

It is puzzling that Kathman
cites Hulme’s research in his endnote. Her examples
of Warwickshire or Midlands dialects are either qualified or introduced as speculative.
She also shares the skeptical opinion that future research will likely “establish
as more widely current such elements of apparently ‘Stratford’ language as
occur in his text” and cites G.D. Willcock’s opinion that
the Shakespeare corpus “shows no sign of surviving local patriotism” (316,
315). Hulme cites some idiosyncratic Shakespearean spellings
consistent with, if not unique to, Warwickshire spellings (316, 318), but some
of her citations depend upon the unfounded assumption that the printing house’s
orthography faithfully followed the author’s manuscript (the hypothetical ‘foul
papers’), when spellings are more likely scribal, compositorial,
or editorial.

The last section in Kathman’s
chapter is about “Shakespeare and Stratford after 1616,” in which he claims
that “a wealth of evidence from the decade after Shakespeare’s death
illustrates Stratford’s fame” (130). That “wealth of evidence” is, by
definition, posthumous. The first testimony in the historic record explicitly
identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as the dramatist appeared in the 1623 First Folio, seven years after
Shakespeare’s death. Kathman failed to establish any
significant connection between the author of Shakespeare’s canon and
Warwickshire during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

iv. Addressing Shakespeare’s alleged education, Carol Chillington Rutter has briefly covered
some of the same territory as T.W. Baldwin in his two-volume
Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, a 1944
survey of educational institutions, curricula, etc. in Elizabethan England, including
the varying educational capabilities of provincial schoolrooms, such as the one
in Stratford. And like Baldwin, Rutter is unable to
cite one document to support the statement that Shakespeare attended school, or
expressed gratitude to a mentor, or attended university or one of the Inns of
Court, or owned a book, or wrote a word of dialogue, a line of poetry, or even
a letter concerning his business affairs.
Shakespeare remains a man of no recorded education. The best that can be
said is that if Shakespeare of
Stratford wrote the plays, then he must have attended the Stratford Grammar
School. His assumed education is therefore the result of circular reasoning. Further,
Rutter’s essay fails to take into account the
playwright’s familiarity with Italian, French, and Spanish, languages not
taught at the grammar school.

v. In recent decades, and using increasingly
sophisticated methods to identify stylometric
features and patterns, scholars have been able to identify more co-authors in
plays such as Titus Andronicus (with
George Peele), 1 Henry VI (with
Thomas Nashe), and
Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton). In “Shakespeare as collaborator,”
John Jowett attempts to identify Shakespeare, the theatrical shareholder, with
Shakespeare, the dramatist. There is ample evidence that Shakespeare of
Stratford was a shareholding member of theatre companies, but when Jowett
claims that “Shakespeare [the playwright] was evidently participating as a
member of the theatre company” (99), he is assuming that which has yet to be
proved.

MacDonald P. Jackson specializes in the “evidence of
stylometrics,” developing tests and using data to map
out sections of texts by particular authors.
However, when
Jackson asserts that Shakespeare and Fletcher “clearly planned their
collaborative plays as a joint enterprise” (106), he is stating more than we
know. Jowett claims that “careful scrutiny of the Shakespeare
collaborations shows him both writing a draft for someone else to complete (as
is clearly seen only in Timonof Athens) and (as is more common with
Shakespeare) completing a play begun by another dramatist” (98-99). In her
edition of Two Noble Kinsmen, Potter advances
her theory of collaboration: “the two dramatists began writing concurrently,
but … Fletcher constructed the final draft. In [certain scenes], he seems
to have been working on, or in the light of, Shakespearean material; nothing
suggests that Shakespeare was ever working on Fletcher’s” (32). These competing
theories do not exhaust the possible dynamics of collaboration, but since we do
not have anything for Shakespeare’s plays comparable to the evidence of
collaborations in Henslowe’s papers (Henslowe’s,
125; Stern 23-24, 25), thus far, the nature of Shakespeare’s collaborations
remains a matter of speculation, and no consensus has emerged.

Whether Shakespeare, the author, whoever he was, actively
collaborated with other dramatists is certainly a matter of interest. Obviously
Jowett, Jackson, and others prefer to envision Shakespeare as all-around man of
the theatre, steeped in playhouse practices, and immersed in all aspects of the
theatre company activities. It is tempting to extend this characterization to include
the role of company dramatist, both solo and in collaboration. But such a
conception of Shakespeare, however attractive it may be, still lacks any
evidence that could prove that Shakespeare of Stratford was a writer. In
addition, there are reasons to question the nature of Shakespeare’s commitments
to the acting and theatre companies, and one of them concerns schedule
conflicts. Although most biographers separate conflicting evidence into
different chapters, when examined chronologically, the documentation shows that
Shakespeare, the actor-shareholder was absent from London in 1597-98, during
the all-important Christmas holiday season when the company performed at court,
and again in 1604, after the theatres re-opened (Price, Unorthodox, 32 -35). Any such absences
during busy performance seasons raise questions about just what Shakespeare’s responsibilities
were with those companies, making it more difficult to build on the traditional
biographical narrative.

vi. Jowett’s essay is one of two in the collection to introduce
the Hand D manuscript additions to the play Sir Thomas More
as not only composed by Shakespeare but also in the handwriting
of Shakespeare of Stratford. He claims that D’s handwriting can be positively
identified as Shakespeare’s by comparison with the six extant signatures (93).
In their essay “What does textual evidence reveal about the author ?,” James Mardock and Eric
Rasmussen also accept the Hand D additions as in Shakespeare’s handwriting
(113). The argument cannot be made on the available evidence. Even if the Hand
D additions fall close to, or within the Shakespeare universe from a stylometric standpoint, the absence of an adequate control
sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting with which to make a comparison constitutes
an insurmountable obstacle (Hays, esp. 241, 248-49).

None of the contributors claiming the Hand D
additions as evidence for the man from Stratford cites Michael L. Hays’s
important paleographical examination or Paul Werstine’s
research. (In addition to Werstine’s 1999 article,
his recent Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and The Editing of Shakespeare exhaustively retraces
the search for authorial ‘foul paper’ and devotes a section to the Sir Thomas More manuscript, including
the Hand D additions. Even though Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
probably went to press before Werstine published in January 2013, among those who are
named in the acknowledgements are John Jowett and Eric Rasmussen, so they were
undoubtedly aware of his research.) Jowett is understandably persistent in his acceptance
of Hand D as Shakespeare; his 2011 critical edition of Sir Thomas More appears
in the Arden Shakespeare series, which itself
gives the argument the appearance of legitimacy. Yet Werstine
criticizes Jowett’s “summary of scholarship on the Shakespeare attribution [as]
bent on marginalizing what it demonstrates to be widespread recent skepticism
about his authorship of the Hand-D pages” (Early, 345, n 29).

In addition, the Hand D pages contain instances of eyeskip, a characteristic consistent with scribal transcription
(Downs, “Book,” 5-15). So there can be no certainty that the Hand D additions
are authorial; they could as easily be scribal copy (Werstine,
Early, 252). Jowett’s “greater confidence” in the Hand D additions as Shakespeare’s (93) would seem to be as
yet unwarranted.

vii. Jowett’s “man of the theatre” argument linking
Shakespeare of Stratford with the playwright is also advanced by Mardock & Rasmussen, even though they cannot cite any
evidence to prove that the actor was also a playwright, either. However, they identify
names of actors such as Will Kemp, Richard Cowley, and John
Sincklo, that appear in a few printed texts (e.g., Romeo and Juliet,
Much Ado, and 3 Henry VI) in some of the speech prefixes, in place of character
names. They cite these actor names to argue that Shakespeare, the actor-playwright
“often seems to have had specific members
of his company in mind” for various roles he wrote (115), even though the
majority of such roles are bit parts. But the dramatist, whoever he was, is not
the only possible source for such speech prefixes. Indeed, those speech
prefixes are more likely scribal, of playhouse origin, or the result of a
memorial report. As co-editor with John D. Cox of the Arden 3 edition of King Henry VI (3),
Rasmussen himself cites those who argue the cases for non-authorial
origins of such speech prefixes (169-73; see also Werstine,
Early, 118). Cox and Rasmussen begin
their section on character names:

3 Henry VI was set into
type from an authorial manuscript rests largely upon the appearance in that
text of three names — Gabriel, Sinklo and Humfrey — thought
to refer to specific Elizabethan actors. (166-67)

The theory that compositors who set type had before
them an “authorial manuscript” — the so-called ‘foul papers’ — still enjoys considerable
currency, even though no ‘foul papers’ have ever been found, so the features
they may have contained, such as speech prefixes that specify actors instead of
characters, remain unknown. As H.R. Woudhuysen dryly
put it: “The argument is a circular one: ‘foul-paper’ texts can be identified
by the presence of those features which are characteristic of ‘foul-paper’
texts” (320). Quite recently, Werstine expanded on the
subject, not only dissecting W.W. Greg’s unsuccessful attempts to identify
characteristics in the hypothetical ‘foul papers’ by comparing extant
theatrical manuscripts to printed texts, but also demonstrating that such imagined
characteristics, as enumerated by Greg and others, are not unique to the
imagined ‘foul papers,’ or, in the words of Barbara A. Mowat :

the very stigmata used
by bibliographers to demonstrate that a play was printed from shakespeare’s
autograph can be found in scribal and theatrical manuscripts as well. (133)

Which brings us back to the texts
in which speech prefixes name players rather than characters.
according to andrew gurr, “the naming of players in playscripts is a vexed question that depends heavily on
what sort of manuscript is identified as the source for the printed text, and
when the names were inserted in the manuscript” (72n); “the source” could be an authorial manuscript, but it
also could be a scribal transcript, edited copy, a reported text, a playhouse
script, or some other descendent copy. However, since no ‘foul papers’ by
Shakespeare or anyone else have ever been discovered, the arguments proposing
that Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ served as printer’s copy for this or that
printed text are sheer speculation. The related argument that Shakespeare, as
author, wrote those actor names instead of speech prefixes,
is also speculation.

It would have saved Greg years of frustration if he
had succeeded in discovering any ‘foul papers’ from the Elizabethan and
Jacobean periods. Several additions in the Sir Thomas More manuscript, such as those by Thomas Dekker and possibly Thomas
Heywood, are autograph, and therefore would seem to be good candidates for
‘foul papers’ categorization, yet Greg had difficulty reconciling them with characteristics
that he considered essential to his definition of ‘foul papers,’ such as illegible
handwriting. The main part of the Sir Thomas More manuscript is in the hand of Anthony Munday,
who is also identified as the principal author of the play. However, Werstine
explains that “it is impossible to know whether Munday authors the play in whole or part, or simply
transcribes it, there being no plays of his undisputed authorship to use for
comparison.” Munday could even have been copying his
own composition. There is similar uncertainty as to whether the Hand D
additions are authorial (whether in the act of composition or as copyist), or
scribal. Despite the problematic evidence and the absence of consensus of
opinion about most aspects of the Sir Thomas More manuscript (Werstine, Early, 251-52, 255), the Hand D theory,
as confidently advanced by Jowett, Mardock, and
Rasmussen, seems to be taking on a new life of its own.

viii. In 2011 and 2012, Brian Vickers furthered the
argument that the 1602 additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy
can be attributed to Shakespeare. In August
2013, The New York Times (Schuessler) announced a forthcoming paper proposing that
Shakespeare’s handwriting can explain textual problems in those additions, as
printed in 1602. That case rests entirely on accepting the Hand D additions as
authorial and in Shakespeare’s handwriting, essentially promoting the Hand D
additions to the status of ‘foul papers,’ the first ever discovered. Such
wishful thinking is reminiscent of Greg’s search for ‘foul papers’ containing
features that could explain problems found in many of the “good” Shakespearean
texts. All the ‘foul papers’ that he thought he had identified turned out
instead to be, for example, scribal transcripts or fair copies. Now Douglas Bruster is going down much the same path, adopting the Hand
D additions as a control sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting and compositional
habits that can be used, as Greg had hoped, to solve problems in a printed text
by inferring how letter formations, spelling patterns, and other authorial
idiosyncrasies may explain mistakes or confusions in the printing house.

Bruster is proposing that in 1602, those printers had before them Shakespeare’s handwritten
manuscript additions to The Spanish Tragedy. Bruster is careful to qualify his thesis
by allowing for the “possibility that an author’s unpunctuated foul papers
served as copy-text, at however close a remove ” [emphasis added],
but if ‘foul papers’ served as printer’s copy, then
the copy-text was not at one remove from those ‘foul papers.’ A manuscript once
or more removed from those ‘foul papers’ — such as a fair copy of the ‘foul
papers’ — is obviously less reliable as an indicator of an author’s preferences
or idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, Bruster builds his
case on the assumption that features in the Hand D additions also would have
been present in the printer’s copy for the 1602 additions. In other words, like
Jowett, Mardock, and Rasmussen in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt,
Bruster accepts the Hand D additions as
Shakespeare’s authorial manuscript, even though the Hand D additions are written
in an unknown hand and could be scribal copy.

ix. Stanley Wells surveys the Shakespearean allusions from
1592 to 1616 (the year of Shakespeare’s death) and on to 1642 (the closing of
the theatres and the start of the Civil War). He challenges anti-Shakespeareans
(or, as I would say, anti- Stratfordians) at the
outset: In order to “suggest alternative nominees for the authorship” a skeptic
would need “to disprove everything that goes to show that they were written” by
William Shakespeare of Stratford (73). On the contrary, one does not need to
disprove everything about Shakespeare of Stratford; rather, a skeptic needs to re-evaluate everything about
Shakespeare of Stratford to determine if he and Shakespeare the writer were one
and the same. Reconsidering the evidentiary value of testimony is not the same
thing as denying that testimony, and that distinction is often ignored in favor
of accusing anti- Stratfordians of being wholesale
deniers of evidence.

As mentioned earlier, the first testimony in the
historic record explicitly identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as the
dramatist appeared in the 1623 First Folio,
seven years after Shakespeare’ death. Wells admits that “despite the
mass of evidence that the works were written by a man named William
Shakespeare, there is none [i.e., allusions recorded up to 1616] that
explicitly and incontrovertibly identifies him with Stratford-upon-Avon” (81). If,
by that, Wells means that none of the Shakespearean literary allusions or
evidence can be directly and personally linked to the actor-shareholder from
Stratford, then Wells has identified the problem. He tries to get around the
problem by uncritically accepting posthumous allusions as equal in weight and
reliability with contemporaneous testimony. Thus, in a tribute to Shakespeare
in 1638 (twenty-two years after Shakespeare died), William
Davenant refers to “The banks of Avon.” Wells claims that this, like the First Folio tribute to the “swan of
Avon,” “again associates the poet with the River Avon” (85), thereby
reinforcing the identification of Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon as the poet.
But Wells misses the more likely explanation: Davenant’s association of
Shakespeare with the river “Avon” is derivative of the 1623 First Folio front matter. Surely, Wells
would not stretch this reasoning to claim that the preface to the 1647 Beaumont
and Fletcher folio, referencing “the then expired
sweet Swan of Avon Shakespeare” was reliable primary testimony, rather than derivative.

Does Wells have a cut-off date to differentiate contemporaneous and/or firsthand testimony
from posthumous hearsay, legend, or derivation? He asserts that “to refuse to
credit the considerable amount of posthumously derived evidence linking the
writer with the Stratford man is totally illogical. To put it at its most basic
level, if we refused to accept posthumous evidence we should have to refuse the
evidence that anyone has ever died” (81). These objections are incorrect on
several levels. One, Shakespeare is the only alleged writer from the time period
for whom one must rely on posthumous evidence to make the authorship case. As I
have said elsewhere and repeatedly, the absence of contemporary personal
literary paper trails for Shakespeare’s biography is a unique deficiency. Two, and
again to repeat, questioning the evidentiary value of testimony, both
contemporaneous and posthumous, is not the same thing as “refusing to accept”
that testimony. And three, Wells claims that on the basis of this criterion, we
should “have to refuse the evidence that anyone ever died.” So, Wells would “refuse”
all the affirmative evidence of death routinely cited in biographies (burial
registers, epitaphs, eulogies, correspondence, diary entries, probated wills,
litigation, deeds and other legal documents, etc.). Such records demand
scrutiny, of course, but despite whatever license or whitewashing may be present
in, e.g., eulogies, tributes, or litigation, such records are generally useful
in documenting a death.

Regrettably, Wells does not put the allusions under the
microscope. Each reference to Shakespeare, or to a Shakespeare play, poem, character,
or quotation, presents an opportunity to interrogate the allusion, for example,
to attempt to determine if its author demonstrates personal knowledge of Shakespeare,
as distinct from familiarity merely with the printed page or performed
dialogue. Such distinctions are important, since the contemporaneous literary
allusions to Shakespeare that Wells cites are
either “cryptic” and “obscure” (79), or they are essentially book or theatre reviews,
necessitating no firsthand knowledge of the author. Anyone can write a review,
or cite a Shakespearean line, without personally knowing the author.

An epigram by John Davies of Hereford illustrates
the importance of such interrogation. Wells introduces the epigram as
“explicitly addressed to Shakespeare” (79). While Wells describes the epigram
as “somewhat obscure,” he does not examine Davies’s choices of words and
possible intended meaning(s). Instead, he asserts that the title (“our English
Terence”) “compares [Shake- speare ] to one of the
greatest of Roman playwrights.” But Terence was also well-known to Elizabethans
and Jacobeans as freed slave who took credit for plays written by the
aristocrats Scipio and Laelius, and other language in
the epigram suggests deliberate ambiguity. In 1995, Wells supposed that the
sobriquet Terence “seems to imply
that Davies thinks of [Shake- speare ] primarily as a
comic playwright, but goes on to speak of him in cryptic terms as an actor.”
After quoting the first four lines, Wells concluded that the verse is “too
vague to be helpful” (Drama, 26).

Yet in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, he is content merely
to identify “our English Terence” as “one of
the greatest of Roman playwrights,” without further analysis. Should an
analysis of Davies’s poem be limited to the title, or should the vagueness of
the poem prompt questions? Is the epigram straightforward or ambiguous? Is it a
literary allusion or a theatrical allusion or both? Is it personal or
impersonal testimony? It is easy enough to cite an epigram, but it should be
incumbent on anyone attempting to defend — or challenge — the traditional
biography to re-examine the testimony to determine what may or may not be
concluded (see Price, Unorthodox, 60-63).

x.

When Wells belatedly read my book in response to Ros Barber’s criticism,
he shared his comments on Blogging Shakespeare, a website for the
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. But he failed to address the single most important
argument I make in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography : that
Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period who
left behind no evidence during his lifetime to support the statement that he
was a writer. And I pointed that out in the Comments section.

To my surprise, Professor Wells responded:

My reason for not commenting on this impressively researched section is
that I find it irrelevant to the discussion of the case that Shakespeare’s
works were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Even allowing that Prof. Wells disagrees with my
conclusion, it is unsettling that he considers a comparative analysis of
evidence “irrelevant to the discussion.” Because evidence and criteria are relevant;
they do matter to historians and biographers. In my book, and more
extensively on my website, I quote various historians and scholars on the
subject of criteria, including distinctions they make between contemporaneous
and posthumous evidence. Now theoretically, Wells could have argued that the
absence of contemporaneous literary paper trails is “irrelevant” — if Shakespeare had left behind perhaps
only 3 or 4 documents during his lifetime. In that case, Wells could have
stretched the odds to argue that too few records survive to expect any of them
to document his alleged literary activities. But Shakespeare left behind over
70 records. As I point out elsewhere, all
of Shakspere’s undisputed personal records are
nonliterary, and that is not only unusual. It is bizarre. Statistically, it is
also a virtual impossibility:

As far as i have
investigated the biographies of shakespeare’s literary contemporaries, the
deficiency of contemporaneous evidence for shakespeare’s career as a writer is unique. Yet his life is,
comparatively speaking, quite well-documented. He left behind over seventy
records. Even the most poorly documented writers, those with less than a dozen
records in total, still left behind a couple of personal literary paper trails.
Based on the average proportions, I would conservatively have expected perhaps
a third of Shakespeare’s records, or about two dozen, to shed light on his
professional activities. In fact, over half of them, forty-five to be precise,
are personal professional paper trails, but they are all evidence of non-literary professions: those of actor,
theatrical shareholder, financier, real estate investor, grain-trader,
money-lender, and entrepreneur. It is the absence of contemporary personal literary paper trails that forces
Shakespeare’s biographers to rely — to an unprecedented degree — on posthumous
evidence. (Price, “Evidence,” 146-47)

Acknowledging the priority of contemporaneous
evidence is not a deviant anti- Stratfordian
obsession. A few years ago, in the Journal of American History,
Michael F. Holt commented on Matthew Pinsker’s essay “Lincoln Theme 2.0”:

I heartily agree with Pinsker’s assessment that one of the most important
developments in Lincoln scholarship since the appearance of David Herbert
Donald’s Lincoln in 1995 has
been the willingness of Lincoln scholars to give credence to
oral and written testimony about Lincoln given after,
and often long after, Lincoln’s assassination.
I studied as a graduate student with Donald a quarter of a century before Pinsker did, but at that time
we were trained to regard such post hoc testimony as toxic
.

In this regard, however, I am puzzled by Pinsker’s
assertion that Michael Burlingame’s massive new two-volume biography …
“will force scholars to confront their increasing reliance on recollected
material in ways that might alter the ongoing reinterpretation of Lincoln’s
private life.” Burlingame does reject some recollections as spurious, but as I
read him, … his modus operandi is not to reject
recollected evidence but rather to pile quotation upon quotation from these
posthumous witnesses. The implicit rule of evidence implied here, as I see it, is
that if eight or ten “witnesses,” as opposed to only two or three, recall
essentially the same thing, then it must qualify as historical fact. [emphasis added]

Holt is pointing out some of the hazards of treating
contemporaneous, posthumous, and derivative testimony as equally reliable.

Wells includes “Publication Evidence” at the end of
his essay to prove the Stratford man’s authorship. It is a list of plays and
poems published with title-page attribution prior to the 1623 First Folio. The title-page attributions
constitute excellent circumstantial evidence for the man from Stratford. They
do not necessarily constitute reliable evidence of authorship (consider Pericles,
Lover’s Complaint, Passionate Pilgrim, A London Prodigal,
and A Yorkshire Tragedy, as well as plays
now known to contain sections by co-authors, such as Titus, Timon,
or 1 Henry VI), nor can they be used
to demonstrate that which has yet to be proved: that the man from Stratford
wrote the works so attributed.

xi. Hardy M. Cook prepared “A selected reading list” as
an appendix, and I am sorry to note that he included
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography in a paragraph listing books arguing
the case for the earl of Oxford (247). I do not argue for or against any
alternative candidate. I do not know how he became aware of my book, but Cook
cannot possibly have glanced at it or my website, or checked the Amazon
listing, or consulted Hope and Holston’s history and bibliography
of anti- Stratfordian studies. Unfortunately, contributors to
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt likewise were either unaware of my research or made a decision to
ignore it. Either way, Dr. Barber was right to call them out on it.

xii. To conclude, the evidence and arguments that I have
considered, as presented by some of the contributors to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt fail to put an
end to the authorship question, and indeed, too many of the claims prove to be vulnerable
or untenable. Wells’s opinion that the unique
deficiency of personal literary paper trails for Shakespeare is “irrelevant” to
the debate suggests to me that the orthodox biography is more in doubt than
ever.

─────. “Hand D and The Book of Sir Thomas More : By The Nature of Your Error.”
Undated pamphlet. (A version of this paper was published without permission in Shakespeare Yearbook, 2007; the paper had already been accepted and announced by Studies in Bibliography.)

Honigmann, E.A.J.
John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson,
Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weever’s ‘Epigrammes’ (1599)
.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

Morgan, James Appleton.
A study in the Warwickshire dialect; with a glossary and notes touching the
Edward the Sixth grammar schools and the Elizabethan pronunciation as deduced from the puns in Shakespeare’s plays
. Third Edition. New York, 1899.

Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi discuss the authorship question in a YouTube video.
At approximately 3:02 into the video, Mark holds up his copy of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography and recommends it to viewers.
See his blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition on the homepage of this website.

Stanley Wells reviews the paperback (“an Unorthodox and Non-definitive Biography) of
the paperback on Blogging Shakespeare
8 May 2013. The author responds
on her website.

At the April 26 Stratford-on-Avon launch of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Ros Barber,
author of The Marlowe Papers, debated the authorship question with Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson.
She’s posted the transcript of the webinar. Here’s a short extract:

PE: Theorising Shakespeare’s authorship by Andrew Hadfield, the University of Sussex.
That chapter really is incredibly helpful, I think, because it’s, its about helping us
all to relax about that fact that we shouldn’t be worried about there being gaps in the
records of people’s lives, or, that the kinds of records that we would most wish to see in
someone’s life don’t in fact survive and aren’t there.

RB: I did have a problem with that chapter, I mean Andrew is someone I know rather well
as my PhD supervisor, but he’d already been challenged on this point, I believe, when he put
this in 60 Minutes, and challenged with the data of Diana Price, because it is actually unusual:
the number of gaps, the amount of gap that there is, if you like, this man-shaped absence of data,
is actually extraordinary, and I thought it was problematic for me in that chapter, that
he – I would like to see an answer to Price, I haven’t yet seen an answer to Price’s data,
showing that Shakespeare’s … the gap in Shakespeare evidence that actually shows he was a writer –
because we have a huge amount of evidence about him, more than any other writer, but not related to writing, so -

PE: It’s how you approach evidence, isn’t it -

RB: Yes.

PE: – it’s what you decide to do with that evidence, and Diana Price has a different agenda,
I think, there, with her telling history. Andrew Hadfield is right in saying we shouldn’t be worried about -

RB: Well, is he? Is he, is he? Because they are extraordinary gaps, they’re not usual gaps, they are
exceptional gaps, and that hasn’t yet been answered, and I’d love to see an answer to that.

“I receive hate mail for questioning the authorship of Shakespeare plays
On William Shakespeare’s birthday, the establishment wants authorship questions to be put ‘beyond doubt’. Is it rattled?”

by William Leahy

Today marks William Shakespeare’s 449th birthday and celebrations are being planned to commemorate this special occasion.
There is nothing new in the observation of Shakespeare’s birthday, but this year there is a difference, a problem perhaps of Stratford’s own making.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust – the guardian of Shakespeare’s global image – will publish a book of
some 20 academic essays that sets out to prove definitively that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems
attributed to him. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt marks a radical development in the Shakespeare Authorship Question,
for it is the first time that the “establishment” has felt the need to acknowledge its existence and importance.

In the past, they have dismissed this question as only of interest to fantasists and, in one famous analogy,
as comparable to Holocaust denial. They have portrayed those who suggest that Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon
wrote the plays as either snobs, attention seekers or psychologically deranged. This is the first time that the
subject is being taken seriously as “an intriguing cultural phenomenon”. Why are they so worried?

One reason is the publication in paperback of
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography by American scholar,
Diana Price, in which she analyses every piece of evidence in existence concerning Shakespeare and concludes that the case for
Shakespeare writing all of the works attributed to him is quite weak. As with my own research, Price does not argue
for an alternative author but rather shows how the case for Shakespeare is built on misreadings, mythologising and, often wilful deception.

Prof. Leahy’s article is a challenge to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy. Edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
(Cambridge University Press, April 2013).
Previews have appeared in The Guardian UK.
(Shakespeare scholars unite to see off claims of the ‘Bard deniers:
As the academic debate gets personal, new book aims to prove William Shakespeare was the author of his own plays)
and The Times (UK) “Academic book aims to place Shakespeare authorship beyond doubt”
(picked up by The Australian.)

On Instapundit April 13, 2013:
IN THE MAIL: From Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem.

NOTE: In this review, I refer to the man from Stratford
as “Shakspere” and to the dramatist as “Shakespeare”. And if you have already read
the opening paragraphs in my Amazon review, please click here to resume reading where you left off.

Prof. Stanley Wells has published a short book
online, downloadable in Kindle, titled
Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare
(Kindle Singles, 4 Feb. 2014). At 57 pages, with virtually
free access, it is a short read, available to anyone interested in the subject.

There is an
obvious irony in the appearance of this e-publication, not quite one year since
the publication of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy,
edited by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013). The 2013 collection of essays by 20
specialists in various fields purported to put an end to the Shakespeare
authorship question once and for all. That mission evidently fell short, or
Wells would not feel any need to further defend the orthodox narrative.

I am one of many
anti-Stratfordians who reviewed the 2013 collection of essays, posting my essay
on my website, with slightly
shorter versions on Amazon US and Amazon UK. I have to wonder whether Wells
read any of the anti-Stratfordian criticism of the essays, as so many claims
re-appear in his Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare.
Since most of my objections concern claims that cannot be supported by the
evidence, at least as I see it, I am concerned here with our disagreements over
criteria and skepticism.

Wells’s pamphlet is a handy summary of unsupported
claims for the orthodox narrative, and it reads plausibly enough for those with
little interest in testing evidence. But he does not re-examine the evidence
for Shakspere using the criteria routinely applied by most historians, critics,
or biographers of other subjects. The unprecedented reliance on posthumous
evidence to prove that Shakspere WAS Shakespeare is a subject on which the
orthodox and I continue to disagree.

However, Wells does acknowledge that the first
evidence in the historical record that identifies the playwright as the man
from Stratford is posthumous; that evidence is, specifically, the Stratford
monument and the 1623 First Folio
testimony. As we agree on this point, it is appropriate for me to reiterate
that Shakspere is the only alleged writer from the time period for whom one
must rely on posthumous evidence to make the literary case, i.e., to support
the statement that his profession was writing. As he pointed out in our
exchange on BloggingShakespeare,
Wells considers this distinction “irrelevant.”

Wells
faults me for questioning the reliability of posthumous evidence: “Price
irrationally casts doubt on posthumously derived evidence.” Most literary
critics, biographers, and historians question the reliability of all evidence,
including that which is posthumous. Such skepticism is not only rational, it is
essentially just common sense.

Robert C.
Williams makes the point: “A primary source is a document, image, or artifact
that provides evidence about the past. It is an original document created contemporaneously
with the event under discussion”
(The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History,
2003, p.58). Paul Murray Kendall puts it this way: “What a man leaves behind
him after he dies is a mess of paper: birth certificate, school grades, diary,
letters, check stubs, laundry lists … This paper trail, extending from his
entrance to his exit, is what the biographer tries to tread” (The Art of Biography, 1965, p. xiii).

Since I am
concerned with the professional literary activities and interests of William
Shakspere, I revisit all his paper trails to ask yet another question: does the
evidence support the statement that Shakspere was a writer or does it have any
bearing on his literary activities or development? If one is attempting to
construct a ‘literary’ biography, then I submit that identifying ‘literary’
paper trails is an essential step. In my book and more fully on here my website
( “Criteria”),
I cite more scholars who illustrate or enumerate
various criteria and problems of reliability, including H.B. George,
Richard D. Altick & John J. Fenstermaker, Harold
Love, S.P. Cerasano, Harold Jenkins, Arthur Freeman, D.
Nichol Smith, John Huntington, and William Ringler, among others
. I doubt that Prof. Wells would describe these scholars as
irrational.

Yet
regarding the Shakespearean testimony in the First Folio, posthumous by seven years, Wells does not
question the authorship of the two prefatory epistles printed over the names of
the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell; he does not analyze the ambiguities
and contradictory statements made throughout the Folio front matter; and he accepts at face value those statements
that support the orthodox narrative. He overlooks the statements that imply or
point to a gentleman of rank, so he never has to choose between two sets of
signposts, or question the overall reliability of the front matter. And how
much of the front matter is promotional in nature, aimed at encouraging sales
(“whatever you do, Buy”)? Surely that sales pitch should alert the reader to be
on the lookout for more signs of a promotional agenda or commercial
considerations in the testimonials.

Similarly, Wells
uncritically accepts literary allusions to the Shakespeare plays and poems as
proof that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare, even when those allusions are
impersonal literary commentary or confined to references to the written or performed
word. Wells is of course following the orthodox biography as it has been handed
down ever since the late eighteenth century. From the time of Edmund Malone,
who was the first Shakespeare scholar to introduce serious scholastic rigor
into his studies, the assumption of Shakespeare’s authorship has been accepted
as fact, and few have stopped to question the absence of proof.
If sheer repetition of a narrative constituted proof of
that narrative, Prof. Wells’s pamphlet Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare would carry the day. But if he applied the
criteria routinely applied by biographers of other subjects, by historians, and
by literary critics, he would have to confront the problem that the orthodox literary biography of Shakespeare is
founded on unproven assumptions.

[The
foregoing is posted on Amazon US and Amazon UK.]

Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare : a point-by-point rebuttal

Wells categorizes
all anti-Stratfordians as “deniers.” Yet, anti-Stratfordians come in many stripes.
Not all anti-Stratfordian arguments have been, or remain, credible. Indeed, there
have been some pretty outrageous anti-Stratfordian claims that make some of us cringe.
But it is unfortunate that in leading off, Wells entitles his first chapter “The
Growth of the Anti-Shakespearean Heresy.” Pejorative #1: “Anti-Shakespearean” makes
it sound as though skeptics hate Shakespeare. Most anti-Stratfordians love the works
of Shakespeare and describe themselves as “anti-Stratfordian” to distinguish the man
from Stratford from the real author, whoever he/she was. Pejorative #2: “Heresy.”
Wells is relegating the anti-Stratfordians in toto to the pre-determined
category of “heretics.” What if anti-Stratfordian skepticism (a term I would prefer) turns
out to be justified? Wells condemns his opponents before he has defended the first
challenge. As one of the “deniers,” I have elsewhere pointed out that I don’t deny
any evidence; I re-evaluate it. And he concludes that my own unorthodox biography
is “destructive”; it has been my goal to reconstruct what can be known about the
life of the man from Stratford, and to reconstruct that life from the available
evidence.

Wells asserts that we know more about Christopher Marlowe than we do about Shakespeare. I would disagree,
and it is relevant to point out why I disagree, since it involves the
distinction between a general paper trail and a literary paper trail. Only a
few parts of Marlowe’s biography are documented, including his sensational murder.
But in general, his life is not particularly well-documented, and few of the
paper trails he left behind are literary.

Marlowe left over twenty records of his presence at Cambridge University, largely recorded in the
so-called buttery books (Boas, 13), but also in academic testimony (Ide, 58-59).
The recommendation for his degree taking includes an inconclusive reference to state
service, whatever that was (Boas, 22-23). So Marlowe is man of recorded education.
We can make no comparable statement for Shakspere.

The circumstances of, and factional
politics surrounding Marlowe’s death have been debated (by e.g., Charles Nicholl
and Paul E. J. Hammer). Yet his
murder sheds no light on his writing career, although the poet George Peele wrote
a tribute to him (“unhappy in thy end / Marley the Muses darling, for thy verse”)
a few weeks after the murder (Nicholl, 51-52). Even Marlowe’s arrest along with
Thomas Watson, presumably the poet, is not evidence of his literary activities.
One has to consider Robert Sidney’s letter to Lord Burghley, reporting
Marlowe’s apprehension for counterfeiting, and Thomas Kyd’s undated letters to the
Lord Keeper protesting that Marlowe’s manuscripts were
“shuffled with some of mine … by some occasion or writing
in one chamber two years since” to make decisions about those reports (with
respect to Kyd’s letters, see especially J.A. Downie, whose analyses raise
questions about the dates of composition of the two letters). But even accepting
those records, Marlowe is one of the least documented of the alleged writers from
the time period – in terms of literary paper trails.

Ironically, we know
more about Shakspere’s professional activities than we do about Marlowe’s. The
evidence that Shakspere left behind tells us that he was a theatrical
shareholder, actor, money-lender, commodity trader, real estate investor, and
so on. Regrettably, none of the evidence for Shakspere’s professional activities
can be used to support the statement that he wrote for a living. And he is a man
of no recorded education.

To put this into
another perspective: Richard Burbage’s business affairs are well-documented, as
are Shakspere’s. Nobody questions whether Burbage was an actor and businessman.
Nobody questions whether Shakspere was an actor and businessman. But like Burbage,
Shakspere left no evidence that would support the statement that he was a writer
by profession.

Early on, in Chapter 1 (the Kindle download does not show page numbers), Wells claims that

we know as much as we have a right to expect about Shakspere’s
public and professional career.

But that is one
of the problems. We do not know as much
as we have a right to expect about Shakspere’s professional career as an
alleged writer, not when the quality of the evidence he left behind is compared to the
quality of that for two dozen writers from the time period. The absence of any
literary paper trails for Shakspere is a unique deficiency.

Wells dates the onset of authorship doubts to the mid-1800s. He claims:

Until the middle of the nineteenth century nobody doubted it.

That statement is inaccurate. We find Elizabethans speculating on or suggesting alternative authors.
A character in one of the Parnassus plays
guesses that a lesser poet named Samuel Daniel wrote Romeo and Juliet.
Gabriel Harvey insinuates that the poet of Venus and Adonis was possibly Sir Edward
Dyer. There are more, although such early expressions of confusion over Shakespeare’s
authorship stopped short of explicit statements such as “I don’t think Shakspere
of Stratford wrote Hamlet.” But they do
show that confusion of attribution and authorship existed during Shakspere’s lifetime.

Nor did doubts about authorship originate with Joseph C. Hart and Delia Bacon. Wells might argue
that they were the first to formalize the question, although both of them present
fairly easy targets, and Wells spends some space ridiculing them. The strategy
is not new. From a review, published in Shakespeare Quarterly, of two books
defending orthodoxy: “One impressed by the learning
and dialectic of a Sir George Greenwood may well feel perhaps that [Frank W.
Wadsworth and R.C. Churchill], eager to write amusingly, have generally chosen to discuss
the more patently absurd [anti-Stratfordian] claims and to disregard arguments
less easily ridiculed” (Maxwell, 437).

Hart and Bacon also
prompt Wells to bring up the snobbery issue. Miss Bacon, for example, could not
reconcile Shakspere’s records, which lacked any documented access to the upper classes,
with the aristocratic perspectives and past-times in the plays and poems. But pointing
out a disconnect is not snobbery; it is the identification of a problem.

Wells claims:

Most recently, as if in despairing acknowledgement of
the absurdity of the proliferation of contenders, sceptics have taken to saying
that they have no idea who the author was, only it can’t have been Shakespeare.

Unlike many anti-Stratfordians, I do not argue for or
against any alternative candidate. Wells implies in the above quote that my candidate-neutral
position is a cop-out. It is not. For one thing, I do not think that presenting
an alternative circumstantial case is the appropriate way to challenge the circumstantial
case for the incumbent William Shakspere; that challenge should be made on its own
merits. For another, as far as I am aware, the advocates for alternative candidates
all present competing circumstantial cases of varying degrees of persuasion. None
has discovered the smoking gun.

Wells claims:

The subject is well worthy of serious academic discussion
as a social, psychological and intellectual phenomenon.

While some anti-Stratfordians are ideologically-driven, Wells implies that anyone
who questions the authorship is somehow lacking mental or emotional
stability. A social, psychological, or intellectual “phenomenon” deflects a discussion
that should be focused on a critical analysis of the evidence, as well as on the
criteria for that analysis.

Wells claims that in the film Anonymous, actor Mark Rylance

also takes the
role of Richard III in the play that is performed on the eve of the Essex
rebellion. (In fact, the play was Richard II, but where so much else is fiction
how can we object to this additional distortion of the historical record?)

Wells corrects the
record that it was Richard II, not Richard III, as the play performed during
the Essex Rebellion, but few of his general readers would be aware that there has
been debate on this subject as to whether the play performed in 1601 was even Shakespeare’s
(see Blair Worden and Paul E.
J. Hammer).

Wells references the earlier collection of essays:

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
(2013) … contains essays on various aspects of the authorship debate
written by an international team of scholars.

In my review essay of this collection, I identified numerous leaps of faith and outright errors
committed by this international team of scholars. Interested readers may take a
look at my review.

Chapter 2

Wells claims:

There is nothing unusual about the fact that so little
is known about William’s siblings; it just highlights how much, by comparison, we
know about him.

With this statement,
Wells sets up the reader to confuse or conflate quantity of evidence with quality
of evidence. One thing that we know about Shakspere from the 70-plus records that
survive is that his professional activities are well-documented. Unfortunately,
his alleged career as a writer is not one of them.

Wells claims:

Stratford was not (as the deniers often claim) a backwater.
A market town, which served the surrounding villages, it had a splendid church,
a well-established grammar school, fine houses and townsmen who were well educated
and wealthy. One of them was Richard Quiney.

Wells cites Richard
Quiney’s ability to write in Latin. In this case, Wells is on solid ground. Some
of Quiney’s correspondence survives, so we know he could read and write Latin.
No comparable evidence survives for Shakspere. But the implication that one might
extrapolate Quiney’s education and correspondence to represent the
general milieu, perhaps the majority of townsmen
in Stratford, is undermined by Charles Knight’s early observation that in the
year that John was elected alderman (1565, the year after son William was born),
only seven out of nineteen aldermen and burgesses could write their names (Knight,
15-17).

All of Wells’s speculation
on what Shakspere would have learned at grammar school remains unsupported by any
evidence. As I pointed out in my review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt,
T.W. Baldwin is unable to cite one document
to support the statement that Shakspere attended
school, or expressed gratitude to a mentor, or attended university or one of the
Inns of Court, or owned a book, or wrote a word of dialogue, a line of poetry, or
even a letter concerning his business affairs. Shakspere
remains a man of no recorded education. The best that can be
said is that
if Shakspere of Stratford wrote the plays, then he must have attended the Stratford Grammar School.
His assumed education is therefore the result of circular reasoning. Nor does Wells explain how a theoretical
grammar school education could have equipped a student with a knowledge of French,
Italian, and Spanish, subjects not taught at provincial grammar schools.

Wells compares William’s hypothetical grammar school training with Ben Jonson’s. While there
is no evidence of Jonson’s attendance at Westminster School, Jonson twice acknowledged
his gratitude to his mentor, William Camden, who had taught at Westminster School:

Camden, most
reverend head, to whom I owe
All that I am in arts, all that I
know,
… … … … … … … . .
… … .
What weight, and what authority
in thy speech!
Man scarce can make that doubt,
but thou canst teach

[epigram xiv]

Jonson’s dedication of Every Man in His Humour in his 1616
folio is addressed to Camden with comparably explicit gratitude, to “the
instructor” for “the benefits confer’d upon my youth”. There is no comparable
evidence for Shakspere.

Richard Field, a
printer who was born and bred in Stratford, printed three of the Shakespeare poems,
but that is not good evidence that Field and the dramatist were acquainted. Nobody
knows how the Shakespeare poems were transmitted to the printing house.

Yet, Wells claims that

It is virtually certain that the two were lifelong friends.

But there is no evidence
to support the statement. (Why the dramatist should name a headless corpse in Cymbeline after Field remains a matter of
speculation.)

a love poem
which puns in its closing lines on the name Hathaway: ‘I hate’ from hate away
she threw, And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’

It’s a guess, not
only about “Hate away” punning on Hathaway, but also involving speculation on
what Shakspere was doing during one of the undocumented Lost Years. Wells further
speculates that during those Lost Years,

before long he was writing plays, sometimes (as was common) in collaboration with others.

“He was writing plays” is not fact. It
is conjecture. There is no evidence that can prove that Shakspere ever composed
a line of dialogue. For those who would look to title page attributions for
that “proof,” it is important to point out that title-page attributions are not
personal records. They are not even
reliable as evidence of authorship (witness the title-pages for A Yorkshire Tragedy,
The London Prodigal, or The Passionate Pilgrim). The authority
of Shakespearean title-pages is further compromised as more “co-authors” are
identified, e.g., Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher,
etc. And in light of other cases of misattribution, it is possible that the
name Shakespeare, however spelled, appears on title-pages for some other
reason.

Of all the allusions to Shakespeare from his own time,
this is the least complimentary, both professionally and personally. On the whole,
people seem to have liked him.

The Upstart Crow passage is indeed uncomplimentary, but Wells’s second statement, that “people
seem to have liked him” cannot be supported by any of the allusions. The
allusions to “gentle” or “sweet” Shakespeare,” “good Will,” “friendly Shakespeare,”
and “so dearly loved a neighbor,” to name some of the most quoted, are examples
of impersonal literary commentary, not testimonials about the author. To paraphrase
Harold Jenkins, the allusions to Shakespeare are of a purely literary character
and necessitate no personal knowledge (11).

In response to
complaints over the open letter containing the Upstart Crow passage, Henry Chettle
subsequently published an apology. Wells repeats the claim that Chettle was
apologizing to Shakspere:

significantly he
goes on to say that ‘divers of worship [i.e., various eminent people; could he
include the earl of Southampton, soon to become Shakespeare’s patron?] have
reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
facetious [meaning urbane, polished] grace in writing that approves [bears
witness to] his art.’ Obviously this refers to a writer (Shakespeare),

There is no evidence that the earl of
Southampton was vouching for the insulted party (and an earl would not be
referred to as your “worship”). But more importantly, Chettle’s apology is
explicitly directed to two of the three playwrights addressed in Groatsworth, that is, Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. However, like most orthodox
biographers, Wells claims that Chettle apologized instead to Shakspere. With
that sleight-of-hand, biographers transform Shake-scene from being the subject of the open letter blasting the
Upstart Crow, into being one of its three addressees,
and therefore one of the “fellow Scholars” who spends his wits “making plays.”
(Lukas Erne makes the case that George Peele is the intended recipient of the
apology.)

Like most biographers, Wells claims
personal interaction and even friendship between the poet Shakespeare and the
earl of Southampton, basing his suggestion on the dedications of the two
narrative poems to the earl:

The first dedication
is relatively formal in tone, the second much warmer, suggesting that a real friendship
may have developed.

Neither dedication
to Southampton is useful in supporting the theory that the poet and the earl of
Southampton developed a friendship or were even acquainted; both dedications are
couched in impersonal or formulaic language. Further, the second dedication
tells us that after his first try with Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare,
whoever he was, was still writing that he had
merely heard about, or been assured
(“the warrant I have”) of Southampton’s presumably generous disposition.

Wells claims:

From now on Shakespeare was the resident playwright of
the most important theatre company in the land.

This is another statement
based on the assumption that Shakspere the actor was also the playwright. So
far, Wells has produced no evidence that Shakspere wrote anything.

Wells claims:

The closeness of this relationship is clear from the
fact that the printed texts of some of the plays he wrote for the company show
that he had specific actors in mind for particular roles. In the first printed
text of Much Ado About Nothing, for
instance, [Will] Kemp’s name appears in speeches designed for the character
Dogberry.

Nobody knows what
the compositors (typesetters) were looking at when they set type for a play,
including Much Ado.
According to Andrew
Gurr, “The naming of players in
playscripts is a vexed question that depends heavily on
what sort of manuscript is identified as the source for the printed text, and when
the names were inserted in the manuscript” (72n; see also
Werstine, 118). “the source”
could be an authorial
manuscript, but it also could be a scribal transcript, edited copy, a reported
text, the transcript of a shorthand report, a
playhouse script, or some other descendent copy. However, since no ‘foul
papers’ by Shakespeare or anyone else have ever been discovered, the arguments
proposing that the dramatist’s ‘foul papers’ served as printer’s copy for this
or that printed text are unsupported by any evidence.

Wells claims:

What all this means in relation to the authorship
question is that the man who wrote the plays (no woman is recorded as having
written for the public theatres in his time) was a thoroughgoing professional,
familiar with, and deeply immersed in, the practices of the public theatres.

Wells builds on Shakspere’s documented
career as an actor and theatrical shareholder, and then adds to that his
assumptions about the authorial origin of certain speech prefixes, to claim that
Shakspere was the dramatist, “a thoroughgoing professional, familiar with, and deeply
immersed in, the practices of the public theatres.” It sounds good, but it is more
than we know.

The cast lists that
Wells quotes, from two Jonson plays of 1598 and 1603, were not printed until 1616,
the year of Shakspere’s death. Not only do they not tell us what parts he played,
they shed no light on his alleged writing activities. They also represent the
first time in the surviving historical record that Jonson recorded the name
“Shakespeare.”

Wells claims:

About half of Shakespeare’s were printed in his lifetime.

Shakespeare, the writer considered his work good enough to “outlive marble.” Shakspere, the
businessman, had a sharp eye for any source of income. The Shakespearean publishing
record therefore presents two obvious contradictions. (And it surely presents a
problem for Lukas Erne’s recent theories about Shakspere’s supposedly active role
in getting his plays into print as a deliberate career initiative.)

Chapter 4

All of the Shakespearean literary allusions are accepted into the literary
biography of a man whose documentary remains cannot support
the statement that he wrote anything. In accepting the literary allusions as
personal testimony for Shakspere, Wells follows the orthodox tradition:

In 1594, when he was thirty years old, a minor writer called Henry Willoughby names
Shakespeare as the author of The Rape of Lucrece, published in that year;

Actually, the allusion (in Willobie His Avisa) to Lucrece is not by Henry Willoughby; the
allusion occurs in a prefatory poem subscribed with the pseudonymous “Contraria
Contrariis: Vigilantius: Dormitanus” (Willoughby,
19-20). Henry Willoughby himself was almost certainly an innocent bystander in
the publication of Willobie His Avisa ;
the attribution to him is made in the preface on the dubious authority of “Hadrian
Dorrell,” for whom no historical evidence exists (Willoughby, 19-20).
All that aside, the naming of Shakespeare as
the author of Lucrece is good
evidence that “Vigilantius” had read The Rape of Lucrece ;
it is not evidence that he recognized Shakspere as that
poet. (Note: In the interest of saving a little space, I am not reproducing all
the literary allusions; many, perhaps most are available online via search
engines.)

Concerning the
much-quoted allusions to Shakespeare in the 1598 publication of Palladis Tamia, Wells claims:

It looks as if [the
author Francis] Meres had private knowledge, possibly that he knew Shakespeare
personally. When he says ‘among his private friends ’ he may mean that
Shakespeare is actually addressing sonnets to his intimates or simply that he
is showing them sonnets which may or may not have been addressed to specific
individuals.

Wells’s suggestion that Meres had inside
personal knowledge of Shakespeare sonnets cannot hold up under scrutiny. While
the statements sound plausible enough, not only is it speculation, it also fails
to take into account the analyses by various scholars. Don Cameron Allen’s
edition of Palladis Tamia remains an
important reference point, and he is not alone when he considers the book “the
work of a hack who had a contracted obligation to fulfill,” one who relied on
literary critics such as George Puttenham and William Webbe for some of his
information (Meres, vii). Another commentator likewise supposed that Meres’s
“information about [the poets] must have come, not from his own direct
knowledge, but from a reliable outside source” (Thomas, “Dating,” 188).

Richard
Barnfield’s praise of Shakespeare’s poetry is another impersonal reference,
necessitating no personal knowledge of the poet of Venus and Adonis. Similarly, although John Weever recognizes the
name Shakespeare as both poet and playwright, his sonnet does not tell us
whether Weever personally knew Shakspere; Weever’s biographer could not be sure
(Honigmann, 21).

With respect to
the three Parnassus plays (Cambridge student satires), Wells claims:

[the character] Gullio has spoken almost all of the second
stanza of Venus and Adonis, exclaims ‘Sweet Master Shakespeare!’ (‘Master’ shows
that he is aware that by this time Shakespeare has been granted a coat of arms and
the status of gentleman that goes along with it.)

The entry in the Stationers Register (1600) for Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV (2) names “master
Shakespere,” and it is subsequent to the grant of the coat of arms to John Shakspere. I am
surprised that Wells did not cite Tom Reedy’s recent attempt to invest that entry
with ultimate attribution authority, as though it were the elusive literary paper
trail that clinches the case. (My analysis of Mr. Reedy’s assertion is here.)

The “praise” that the character Gullio bestows on “sweet Master Shakespeare” is, in
the opinion of the editor of the Parnassus
plays, worthless praise from a fool (337). And while some critics consider
Gullio a stock character rather than a satire of a real person, the scenes in
which Gullio appears merit a closer look. My own analysis of the Parnassus plays, as they concern the Shakspere
biography, takes up several pages in my book.
And a close look at the scenes in which Shakespeare (however spelled) is
mentioned can support an unorthodox narrative of Shakspere’s life. One cannot break
the impasse by avoiding the ambiguities and contexts that should raise red flags.

The orthodox biographer
rarely puts these sorts of allusions under the microscope, probably because
such analyses raise too many awkward questions. However, anti-Stratfordians have
been free to ask such questions, as did, for example, Sir George Greenwood; his
analyses of the Parnassus scenes,
especially the one with actors Burbage and Kemp (328-330), remain Must Reads. Any critical reader of the Parnassus plays will also want to consult
J.B. Leishman’s edition to get some ideas about how to decide which interpretation(s)
might make sense. To present the Parnassus
lines as obvious, or to be taken at face value, is a disservice to the Elizabethan
and Jacobean satirists, who were conditioned to write between the lines, and to
poke fun in ways that, if challenged, allowed them to defend their innocent intentions.

Wells claims that
the pedant Gabriel Harvey’s annotations show that he knows “Shakespeare as both
poet and dramatist.” But Harvey’s written annotation demonstrate his familiarity
with the printed works of Shakespeare in both genres ; his comments could not by any stretch be used to show that he
personally recognized the man from Stratford as the poet-dramatist.

Wells claims:

The second poem to be explicitly addressed to
Shakespeare appears in a collection by the poet known as John Davies of
Hereford (to distinguish him from another of the same name). Cryptic as
epigrams of this period often were, it certainly names him as an actor, and in
its title –‘ To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shakespeare’, compares him to the
great Roman dramatist whose plays were often studied in schools. (Absurdly,
some of the deniers say that this comparison with Terence, who apparently had a
reputation as a plagiarist, shows that Shakespeare’s reputation was based on
other men’s works.)

Wells is dismissive
of anti-Stratfordians who point out that “Terence” was known not only as a dramatist
but also as a front man. He grudgingly acknowledges that Terence “apparently had
a reputation as a plagiarist.” Apparently? No, Terence’s reputation as a front for
aristocratic playwrights (Scipio and Laelius) was well-known to those who lived
in Shakespeare’s time; that reputation was in print in several editions of Roger
Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570, 1579,
1589) and also in the 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays. Identifying ambiguities in this epigram is a necessary step.
A full analysis of Davies’s epigram to “Shake-speare,” as well as some of Davies’s
other epigrams that precede and follow the one to Shake-speare, reveals many more
ambiguities and competing interpretations. I disagree that identifying
potential ambiguities is absurd.

Chapter 5

Few question the
legal and documentary records that can be used to reconstruct Shakspere’s activities
in the theater, whether as actor, company shareholder, or shareholder in the Globe
and Blackfriars theaters. They may yield more information about Shakspere’s
activities than previously thought, as I have argued elsewhere (Unorthodox, 102-8). However, there is one
record that I still have questions about: the 1604 Revels accounts that Wells
cites:

In the Christmas
season of 1604 to 1605 he is explicitly named four times (under the spelling
‘Shaxberd’) as the author of the plays – including seven by him – acted at
court before the king and his family.

Some readers will have heard of the notorious forger John Payne Collier. Collier’s friend
and colleague, Peter Cunningham (1816-69), came under suspicion when he tried
to sell the 1604-5 and 1611-12 Revels accounts to the British Museum in 1868.
These accounts were at first pronounced forgeries, then pronounced genuine,
then questioned again. A. E. Stamp’s TheDisputed Revels Accounts (1930)
continues to be quoted as the ultimate vindication of the disputed documents,
but Samuel A. Tannenbaum’s analysis of their irregularities, e.g., Shakspere Forgeries (1928), leaves
lingering doubts. In my view, the jury is still out. And the “Shaxberd”
spelling should prompt more questions than it does.

Wells introduces the famous Heywood apology:

The Passionate Pilgrim was reprinted
in 1612 with the addition of other poems by the prolific dramatist and poet
Thomas Heywood, who, in another book, An Apology for Actors
(published in the same year), complained of the
‘manifest injury’ done to him by including some of his poems in a book under
another’s name, pointing out that this might give the impression that he had
stolen them. And he says that the author – obviously Shakespeare – was ‘much
offended’ with Jaggard, who had, ‘altogether unknown to him, presumed to make
bold with his name’. Probably as a result, the original title page was
cancelled and replaced by one that does not name Shakespeare.

It is not
“obviously” Shakespeare who was the “much offended” party, although that claim has
been repeated so often that it has solidified into “fact.” A “manifest injury” was
inflicted when some of Heywood’s poems were passed off, by published William Jaggard,
as by Shakespeare, named on the title page. It would seem that either Heywood
or Shakespeare could have taken offense at the misattribution. But in this
case, the victim of the “manifest injury” was not Shakespeare, but Heywood. Like
his predecessors, Wells pays no attention to the semantics and literary conceits
used by Heywood in his Apologie for Actors, in which he refers to himself
three times as the “Author” before repeating the word in the famous passage
that Wells quotes (Price, Unorthodox,
138-39). Wells further claims that “as a result, the original title page was cancelled
and replaced by one that does not name Shakespeare.” Actually, if Colin Burrows
has it right, and he makes some good observations (79n), it was the other way around:
Shakespeare’s name was left off of the first title pages to come off the press and
was re-instated in a press correction, for promotional purposes.

Wells opines that
Shakspere may not have approved of the publication of plays such as
A Yorkshire Tragedy or The London Prodigal, both attributed to Shakespeare
on the title pages; these are two of the plays in the Shakespeare Apocrypha. But
Wells’s unsupported assumption (that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare) should raise
yet another red flag. Considering the plays and poems misattributed to
Shakespeare (or to “W.S.”) during his lifetime, as well as the number of Shakespeare
plays published in corrupt editions (the so-called “bad quartos”), the larger
question is, or should be: “where was Shakespeare?”

Wells reports on
the Shakespeare collaborations as though they obviously represented active hands-on
partnerhships. Collaborations can certainly represent two or more authors actively
working at the same time on various parts of a play, whether jointly writing scenes
or revising each other’s drafts, for example. The Henslowe papers show payments
in the same entry to playwrights collaborating and getting paid for their respective
contributions to a play (Henslowe’s, 125,
126, 127, 129, etc.). But other scenarios are possible.

Scholars simply do
not have the evidence to prove the nature of the Shakespearean collaborations,
that is, whether active or passive.
Some
editors of collaborative plays such as Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton) or
Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher) consider the possibility that one or the
other playwright was picking up an abandoned or incomplete text, and contributing
to, adding to, or revising a play independently of a second author (Jowett, Timon, 98-99; Potter, 32).

Chapter 6

Wells associates Shakspere’s son with Hamlet :

Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (the name is a variant of Hamlet)

It may be pleasant to think that Shakspere named his son in anticipation of the title
character of what was to become Shakespeare’s most famous play. However, Shakspere’s
neighbors were Hamnet and Judith Sadler, and biographers reasonably suppose that
the Shakspere twins were named after their neighbors. However, since Hamnet Sadler’s
name is spelled “Hamlet” in a few Stratford documents, Wells’s supposition is
not outrageous. But there are only two documentary records for son Hamnet, his christening
in 1585 and his burial in 1596. Both are spelled “Hamnet” (Chambers, Facts, 2:3,4).

Wells claims:

So far as we know Shakespeare’s wealth came from his
share in the profits of the acting company; and this supposition is supported by
the fact that other members of the King’s Men also died wealthy men.

Wells cites Henry
Condell and Augustine Phillipps as shareholders who likewise amassed a small fortune.
But their wealth is documented in later years. However, I point out that:

While it is safe
to conclude that Shakspere made money from theatrical investments, even his
shareholding does not fully explain his financial history. He bought New Place
in Stratford in 1597, three years after he became a shareholder in the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, but two years before
he became a shareholder in the Globe theatre. Obviously, Shakspere had other
sources—major sources—of income. (Unorthodox, 101)

And in 1598, Shakspere
invested in a commercial quantity of grain and was approached for financing by
Stratford neighbors. Again, that is a year before the Globe was built.

Chapter 7

To begin with
the posthumous evidence, specifically the Stratford monument, Wells claims:

it is surely patently obvious that whoever wrote them
[the epitaph] wished to convey that a man called Shakespeare who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon
was a supremely great writer. The deniers have to go through extraordinary contortions
in their attempts to deny this.

Agreed: the monument conveys the impression that Shakspere was the writer. But there are
more questions: What is its provenance? What does the epitaph tell us? Wells
himself describes the epitaph as “cryptic.” Why doesn’t the epitaph contain explicit
and coherent praise of a writer? More on this below.

In the final analysis,
it all comes down to the 1623 First Folio
about which Wells claims that

several references in the prefatory matter of the First Folio make it very clear that this
is the Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

True. But as I conclude in an article published in the Tennessee Law Review :

One of the critical
passages from Heminges and Condell’s testimony is the claim that they are publishing
the plays in the First Folio “Only to
keep the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our <
Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays.”
This claim is made in no uncertain terms. Now, just who wrote this passage is an
authorship question for another day, but in weighing this testimony, one would need
to put the author on the stand to determine whether he was an impartial and trustworthy
witness, if he was a pen for hire, if he had an agenda, if he contradicted himself,
and so on. In other words, we would need to be satisfied that this testimony holds
up under cross-examination. However, putting aside the complexities of this testimony,
for the sake of argument, let us accept this statement at face value.

If we do, is this
good evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford was the writer? I’d say yes. Is it personal
evidence? I’d say yes. So, does it qualify as a personal literary paper trail for
Shakespeare? That depends on the admissibility of posthumous evidence. I maintain
that it is not admissible as contemporary testimony. But every modern biographer
follows the lead of E.K. Chambers [Sources,
50], who asserts that this “prefatory matter … may be regarded as contemporary ” [emphasis added].

Why? Why should it be regarded as contemporary, when it is posthumous by seven years? (145-46)

Wells does not question
the authorship of the two prefatory epistles, he does not identify and analyze the
ambiguities and contradictory statements throughout the front matter, and he accepts
at face value those statements that support the orthodox narrative. In other
words, he overlooks the signposts in the Folio
front matter that point to a well-born author, so he never has to choose between
the two contradictory sets of signposts, much less question the reliability of
the front matter. In the absence of contemporary evidence that could prove that
Shakspere wrote for a living, the question about the reliability of the First Folio testimony is of great
relevance.

Chapter 8

In “Some Arguments Aainst,” Wells states that

The argument is that the town [of Stratford] was an intellectual
and cultural backwater which could not have fostered genius.

While there were educated men in Stratford, I doubt that Wells would characterize the market
town as the intellectual and cultural capital of Warwickshire. Nevertheless, I do
not say that Shakspere couldn’t have become
the literary genius. I do say that if
he did, he would have left some records behind to show how
he did it. By leaving out that important question, Wells can again
set up a misplaced argument about the intellectual snobbery of skeptics.

In his attempt to
absolve the dramatist, whoever he was, of foreign travels to Italy, Wells claims
that “we don’t know for certain that Shakespeare didn’t visit Italy.” There is no
evidence that Shakspere did. Wells then denigrates the research of Richard Paul
Roe (The Shakespeare Guide To Italy),
by pointing out that Romeo and Juliet
is not, as Roe stated, Shakespeare’s first play. Probably not, although in 1845,
Joseph Hunter proposed that it was (2:120-21). Yet that “howler” is enough for
Wells to belittle Roe’s research. (Would Wells dismiss out of hand the
2012 Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, because,
in the introduction, Arthur F. Kinney states that ca. 1577-78, Philip Henslowe built
the Curtain in Shoreditch?) More to the point,
Roe’s research is not dependent on the generally accepted chronological order of
writing. His areas of inquiry are the culture, geography, topography, and customs
in early modern Italy. He identified Shakespearean dialogue that might exhibit
firsthand familiarity with matters Italian. He then attempted to retrace the dramatist’s
Italian travels, using the dialogue as his guide, to see if there were, in
fact, real life prototypes, locations, travel routes, and so on.

Wells criticizes Roe’s reconstruction of the travels in Two Gentlemen :

The author of The Two Gentlemen of Verona does not
simply say that the journey is made by
water, but makes it quite clear that it is a sea journey. Proteus says to
Speed:

Go, go, be gone, to save your ship from wreck,
Which cannot perish, having thee aboard,
Being destined to a drier death on shore. (1.1.141– 3)

This in itself is enough to show that the playwright
imagined a voyage by sea, not by canal, on which ships, shores and wrecks are
to say the least uncommon.

Wells omits subsequent critical lines of text that Roe explores, including the dramatist’s
clarifications of terms:

Panthino tries
to get Launce to understand that by “tide” he means “flood.” Roe describes the
canal and sixteenth century lock system that produced the “flood” that transported
the boat out of the “mitre gates.”

Launce Lose the tide, and
the voyage, and the master, and the service, and the tied! Why, man, if the river were dry, I am able to
fill it with my tears; if the wind were down, I could drive the boat with my
sighs. [emphasis added] (II.iii.50-54)

Roe cites Elizabethan
and Jacobean travel reports, in which “river” is used interchangeably with
“canal,” 150), and he documents the use of the inland canal system by large
cargo-laden vessels and even warships, generally associated with ocean sailing (47,
48, 49, 58-59). Roe is able to reconstruct several other Shakespearean
journeys, including those in Merchant of Venice and Winter’s Tale.

Roe’s research is more meticulous than Wells indicates. Nevertheless, if Wells were determined
to find fault with his research, he might have criticized Roe’s reliance on the
quarto or Folio texts with respect to presumed authorial choices of spelling or
capitalization (Roe, 146-47, 148, 184-85). None of the printed plays can be
proven to be based on the author’s so-called “foul papers” (see Werstine, e.g.
44-50). Nevertheless, Roe’s research is not ultimately reliant on the printed
idiosyncrasies. Wells might also have criticized Roe’s reliance on a modern Catalan
dictionary for translations of the names Ariel and Caliban (as Ros Barber
pointed out on the Shaksper listserve). Perhaps some anti-Stratfordians can dig
around for sixteenth-century Catalan journals, maritime logs, correspondence, and
so on, that might prove the case one way or the other. But it’s a minor point, especially
compared to his major discoveries, including St. Gregory’s Well in
Two Gentlemen and the Duke’s Oak in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Roe’s research is ground-breaking, not the least because he read the Italian plays more
closely than his predecessors. In a sense, his list of Italianate specifics comprised
a sort of bucket list. I do not know how many more investigations he had in
mind before his death in 2010, but based on his published book, his batting
average is outstanding. It is regrettable that Wells does not appreciate Roe’s original
research or share in the thrill of his discoveries.

Switching the subject to Shakespeare’s genius. If, as Wells claims, some anti-Stratfordians discount
the notion of genius, I am not one of them. I do consider genius a factor in studying the Shakspere biography, but
I am puzzled that Wells argues that

The achievements of such relatively untutored geniuses
as a Robert Burns, a John Clare, a Charles Dickens, a Franz Schubert, a William
Blake, an Emily Dickinson, a Charlotte Brontë, or a Mark Twain should be enough
to disabuse anyone of such a notion.

Yes, and every one
of these geniuses left behind some evidence that I call literary paper trails. Some
of those “untutored” geniuses even left behind evidence, however scanty, of
their education (e.g., Burns, Brontë, Dickinson, and Schubert). For none of these
literary geniuses of humble beginnings must one rely on posthumous evidence to support
their literary development or activities. So again, if Shakspere was another
untutored genius, how did he do it?
There is no evidence that can tell us how he did it.

Chapter 9

In his criticism of my paperback edition of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography,
Wells reproduced much of the relevant sections of his comments first
posted on Blogging Shakespeare. He claims:

At other points she attempts to denigrate Shakespeare
of Stratford’s literary reputation by proposing that his wife and daughters were
illiterate.

The evidence we have (including
Susanna’s single ill-formed signature and her inability to recognize her husband’s
handwriting) supports the statements that wife and daughters were indeed functionally
illiterate.

Wells claims:

Price writes of Stratford-upon-Avon as an educational
backwater, while also quoting John Hall’s description of one of the Quineys – the
family into which Judith Shakespeare married – as ‘a man of good wit, expert in
tongues, and very learned’.

As we have seen, there is more evidence to support the statement that Richard Quiney could read
and write in both English and Latin. But daughter Judith’s marriage to Thomas
Quiney is not evidence of her literacy; obviously, literate in-laws do not
automatically confer literacy on illiterate relatives, even spouses. (See also
Charles Knight’s observation above).

Wells’s criticism that I “misleadingly [say] that there are ‘no commendatory verses to Shakespeare’,
ignoring those printed in the First Folio,
as well as the anonymous prose commendation in the 1609 edition of Troilus and Cressida, and that by Thomas
Walkley in the 1622 quarto of Othello.”
His criticism illustrates the problems that Wells and I have with criteria. The
commendatory verses in the First Folio
were published seven years after Shakspere died. The poems by Leonard Digges
and Hugh Holland contain literary praise but no personal testimony about the
author. Digges’s reference to the Stratford monument may or may not be at
firsthand.

Jonson’s eulogy
is far more complex. Like his two Folio
epistles, Jonson’s eulogy is factually inconsistent, but it takes many pages to
comprehensively explore his language and point out the contradictions. Suffice
it to say here, by taking certain statements at face value and ignoring those
containing contradictions, Wells can avoid choosing between two sets of
signposts, the first pointing to Shakspere of Stratford, and second pointing to
an unnamed gentleman.

There are two
editions of Troilus, both printed in 1609.
The preface in one issue of Troilus tells
us nothing personal about the dramatist, and it claims that Troilus is
“a new play, never staled with the stage, never
clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.” The title-page of the other issue
contradicts that claim; it states that the play “was Acted by the Kings
Majesty’s Servants at the Globe.” Far from confirming the traditional
attribution, these conflicting statements simply raise more questions.

The 1622 epistle
by Walkley, the publisher of Othello,
tells us that the dramatist was dead, but offers no further details except to
encourage potential customers to read the play. Neither the Troilus nor the Walker prefaces require personal
knowledge of the author. They are impersonal literary commentary aimed at
encouraging sales.

Wells refers to:

the monument in Holy Trinity Church, with its inscriptions eulogizing Shakespeare of Stratford as a writer.

The epitaph reads: “Stay Passenger, why goest
thou by so fast? / Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath plast [placed] /
Within this monument Shakspeare: with whom / Quick nature died: whose name doth
deck this tomb / Far more than cost: sith [since or see] all that he hath writ
/ Leaves living art, but page to serve his wit”. As I have argued above and
in more detail in the book, the epitaph to Shakespeare does not constitute coherent
praise for a writer. Some of the shortcomings are obvious, especially so when one
compares the epitaph to those for

Edmund
Spenser “with thee our English verse was rais’d on high”

Francis
Beaumont “He that can write so well”

Michael
Drayton “a Memorable Poet of his Age”

John
Taylor “Here lies the Water Poet”

George
Chapman “a Christian Philosopher and Homericall Poet”

(Pettigrew, 406, 407; LeNeve, 150).

Wells repeats his
criticism from his BloggingShakespeare
comments on William Basse’s (or John Donne’s?) elegy:

Still more importantly,
Price downplays William Basse’s elegy on Shakespeare, which ranks him alongside
Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont. This poem could have been written any time after
Shakespeare died, and, as I have said, it was circulated widely in manuscript –
at least thirty -four copies are known – before and after it was published in 1633;
and Price fails to note that one of the copies is entitled ‘On Willm Shakspear buried
att Stratford-vpon-Avon, his Town of Nativity’.

…

So William
Basse’s poem, and the fact that it has come down to us in so many versions,
bears witness to Shakespeare’s popularity as a great writer worthy of
comparison with England’s best. And the titles people gave to some versions of
Basse’s poem make clear that this was the Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon;
one of them, indeed, reads ‘On Willm Shakspear buried att Stratford-vpon-Avon,
his Town of Nativity’. It is a clear identification by an unprejudiced early
witness of Shakespeare the playwright as a Stratford man.

My response to that criticism stands:

I “downplay” this elegy for several reasons.
Its authorship remains in question; it may have been written by John Donne, to whom
it is attributed in Donne’s Poems of 1633. There is no evidence that either Basse
or Donne knew Shakspere. And yes, the elegy does exist in numerous manuscript copies;
the one allegedly in Basse’s handwriting is tentatively dated 1626 and shows one
blot and correction in an otherwise clean copy– suggesting that it might be a transcript.

The poem itself contains no evidence that
the author was personally acquainted with Shakspere. Whether by Donne or Basse,
it is a posthumous and impersonal tribute, requiring familiarity with Shakespeare’s
works, and, possibly, details on the funerary monument in Stratford. Wells and Taylor
themselves cannot be certain which manuscript title (if any) represents the original
(Textual, 163).

Wells seems to
think that the Basse/Donne poem is convincing evidence that Shakspere wrote
Shakespeare. The title ’On
Willm Shakspear buried att Stratford-vpon-Avon, his Town of Nativity’ is prefixed to
one of the manuscript copies of unknown provenance. The title could be
derivative of the First Folio front
matter, it could be reliant on the monument inscription, but it cannot prove
that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare.

Wells is critical that I offer “a detailed discussion of William Dugdale’s sketch, made
around 1634, of the Stratford monument”.

She accepts this
monument as an effigy of the Stratford Shakespeare, but fails to take note of Dugdale’s
statement that it portrays ‘william Shakespeare the famous poet’, even though she
reproduces it in her book.”

The annotation in Dugdale’s notebook tells us very little, since it is impossible to know
whether it represents Dugdale’s original description or is derivative of
someone else’s. Interestingly, and also in 1634, a Lt. Hammond similarly described
“A Neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr. William Shakespeere” (Chambers,
Facts, 2:243). Perhaps one report was
derivative of the other, or just as likely, both derived from the same source. For
all we know, the Stratford vicar put up a make-shift sign in the chancel to make
sure that visitors were made aware of what they were looking at.

Wells faults me for citing sonnets when it suits my unorthodox purpose, although he
did not specify which ones he would challenge. The reason I cite certain
sonnets is because they are difficult to reconcile with Shakspere’s documented
activities.

Wells
especially faults me for not dealing with Sonnet 136, which proves that the author’s
name was Will (‘I was thy Will’ and “My name is Will”).’ Wells’s criticism of my
selectivity must stand; I did not quote this sonnet. However, Stephen Booth’s critical
edition of the Sonnets provides readers
with various interpretations from which to choose. And when one juxtaposes Sonnet
136 and the lines about “My name is Will” with these lines from sonnet 72
[emphasis added]

My name be buried where my body is
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

one confronts a contradiction. “My name is Will” vs. “My name be buried where my body is.” The
conflicting sentiments are difficult to reconcile with the orthodox narrative,
but perhaps less difficult with an unorthodox one.

In closing, Wells argues with plausible-sounding statements that cannot withstand skeptical scrutiny,
and too often, extended scrutiny exposes the weakness or invalidity of an assumption,
the ambiguity of the actual text, and in some cases, an outright misreading of an
allusion (such as the Chettle apology). It has been
my intention in challenging the various claims made by Prof. Wells to
demonstrate why questions remain about Shakespeare’s authorship.

Wells has not been able to produce one literary paper trail for Shakspere, left
behind during Shakspere’s life. (Interestingly, he steered clear of the one “literary
paper trail” proposed by scholars in 1923: that is, the Hand D portions of
the Sir Thomas More manuscript. The identification
of Hand D as Shakspere’s continues to gain momentum in orthodox circles as
another “fact,” so I suppose it is a relief that Wells omitted it.)

In the absence of documentary evidence comparable to that left behind by two dozen
other writers from the time period, the orthodox literary narrative
for Shakspere collapses. If sheer repetition of a
narrative constituted proof of that narrative, Prof. Wells’s pamphlet
Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare would carry
the day. But if he applied the criteria routinely applied by biographers of other
subjects, by historians, and by literary critics, he would have to confront the
problem that the orthodox literary biography of Shakespeare is founded on unproven
assumptions, not facts.

Bibliography

Altick, Richard
D. and John J. Fenstermaker. The Art of Literary Research
. 4th ed. New York:
Norton, 1993.

Honigmann,
E.A.J.
John Weever: A Biography of a
Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, Together with a Photographic
Facsimile of Weever’s ‘Epigrammes’ (1599)
. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1987.

“It is highly unusual, if not unique, to find only posthumous literary evidence remaining for an individual who supposedly lived by his pen.”
There were many Shaksperes, so why pick the Stratford man? Shakspere was frequently absent from London so how important was he to the
theater company? Examined is frequent use of the hyphenated name. “No other Elizabethan or Jacobean author appeared in hyphenated
form with comparable frequency.” Ben Jonson didn’t write anything about Shakespeare or Shakspere during the latter’s lifetime,
“a surprising omission for an author who wrote explicitly about most of his literary colleagues.” Price shows how Stratfordian
biographers spin facts and allusions to make the author “good” and “gentle Will.” With liquid assets and business acumen,
Shakspere is touted as seminally important in behind-the-scenes activities. Why, then, is there no real, literary, paper trail? Many
Elizabethan writers are buried in Westminster Abbey. Shakspere isn’t one of them. Price argues that Shaksperes signatures
are “not evidence of a literary career.” For her, the plays were intended to be read as literature. [Contrast with Irvin Matus’
view in “The Ghost of Shakespeare,” Harper’s, April 1999.] There is detailed analysis of Jonson’s contradictory allusions in dedications and plays.
“Jonson’s two conceptions of Shakspere/Shakespeare are inherently incompatible, but his conflated testimony makes
sense if he recognized Shakspere and Shakespeare as two different people. Jonson knew better than to comment explicitly
in print on the professionally performed plays of an aristocrat.” As for Michael Drayton, poet and Warwickshire man
treated by the Stratford man’s doctor son-in-law, “he concluded the poem [Elegies upon Sundry Occasions] by talking
about aristocratic poets who had written for the stage, but whose names he would not reveal.” If the Sonnets of 1609 are
dedicated to “OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.,” he’d most certainly be dead. Price investigates the lack of Shakspere’s literary
bequests and absence of books in his home. She argues that statistically the lack of any literary personal records for
Shakspere is “a virtual impossibility.” No conspiracy was necessary. Think about the mores of the time. Aristocrats would
not write for profit, nor would men of humble origin incriminate one who did write for the theater. Facts are needed despite
genius, so where did Shakspere get those? Why were his daughters “functionally illiterate”? The author knew Italy and falconry and
royal tennis and used his knowledge to create metaphors. The dating of The Tempest is examined. “Shakespeare” was an
“entrepreneur and financier,” not a dramatist. There are thirty-one illustrations, including applications for John Shakspere’s
coat of arms, letters with signatures of Elizabethan authors, Shakspere‘s signatures, the Holy Trinity Church monument,
the Dugdale sketch, portrait engravings of various writers. Appendix: Chart of Literary Paper Trails, bibliography, index.

An earlier review by Warren Hope in The Elizabethan Review

"Once you have eliminated the impossible,” an ascetic Holmes instructed the fleshy Watson, "what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Holmes’s axiom could serve as the motto for Diana Price’s new book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. Her subject is nothing less than
the impossibility that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was William Shakespeare, the poet and playwright. This subject makes her book
unlike any book dealing with the Shakespeare authorship question that has appeared in years.

Most writers on this subject are concerned with either defending the traditional attribution of the plays and poems to William
Shakspere of Stratford or with stripping Shakspere of his laurels and placing them on another’s head. Price takes a new approach
or, rather, an approach that is so old that it now seems new, and makes it her own.

Price spends next to no time or space on who the poet and playwright actually was except to indicate the likelihood that
he was “a gentleman of rank.” She instead tackles the question of who William Shakspere of Stratford actually was--a subject
that has been too frequently ignored by Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians alike.

Stratfordians don’t deal at length with the subject because they inevitably run into facts that are contrary to their view
of the author. Anti-Stratfordians don’t deal at length with the subject because they are less interested in what used to be
called “the negative argument,” that is, the case against the Stratford citizen’s claims to authorship, than in making a case for
their pet candidate for Shakespearean honors. The result is the neglect of a vital but virtually untouched field of study.
Price works that field admirably and the harvest is abundant.

This abundance flows from Price’s method. She is restrained, reasonable, and patient. But she has the wit and imagination
to not restrict herself to facts that are supported by physical or documentary evidence—although such facts play a prominent
part in her book. She is perhaps at her best when she analyzes and interprets literary allusions to William Shakspere—Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson’s “On Poet-Ape,” are instances, the first so well-known to students of Shakespeare that its
meaning often goes unfathomed and the second so little known that the light it throws on Will Shakspere’s life is rarely even considered.

Price’s lucid prose, graced with understatement, is the perfect vehicle for her re-examination of what can honestly be known of
William Shakspere’s actual life based on all the available records and sources. The result is a coherent and credible portrait
of a tight-fisted, hard-headed, vain, ignorant, clever, shrewd theatrical impresario who is clearly the antithesis of the author
of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. As Price knows and shows, even Shakespeare felt compelled to ridicule Shakspere.

Like many good logicians, Price saves her most damning argument for the book’s end. She devotes an Appendix to what she calls
a “Chart of Literary Paper Trails.” This chart — actually an essay reduced to a chart that is supplemented with extensive
notes — answers the frequently heard but unexamined assumption that we know so little of Shakspere’s life as a writer because
we know little or nothing of the lives of the writers of his time.

She examines the records of twenty-five writers, ranging from the firmly established Ben Jonson to the admittedly obscure
John Webster, and organizes these records into ten categories. Of the twenty-five life records examined, only one results
in a complete blank — the records of William Shakspere of Stratford. It is this vacuum of a writer’s life that Price deftly
replaces with her coherent portrait of an avaricious, energetic man-of-the-theater from the provinces.

A thorough reading of this thoroughly readable book by anyone who is not prejudiced beyond reason on its subject will
necessarily lead to the conviction that it is impossible that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays
and poems of William Shakespeare.

It has come to my attention that you replied to Alexander Waugh’s communication last week concerning the British Library’s announcement
about the Sir Thomas More manuscript, specifically the Hand D Additions. I share Mr. Waugh’s concern that in its announcement about
the digitization project, the British Library described the Hand D Additions as “Shakespeare's only surviving literary manuscript.”
As of today, 16 May 2016, those words are still on your
web page http:/www.bl.uk/collection-items/shakespeares-handwriting-in-the-book-of-sir-thomas-more .

In your response to Mr. Waugh, you refer to Prof. John Jowett’s Arden edition of the play and also to the fact that
“most collected works of Shakespeare published since 1951 have included Sir Thomas More : “This of course chimes with Diana
Price’s acknowledgment of ‘received scholarship’ in this field in the article you referenced.” Rather,
it would be accurate to say that my research challenges the “received scholarship.” And as I understand
from Michael L. Hays, his article questioning other aspects of the paleographic case is forthcoming in
Shakespeare Quarterly. Prof. Jowett himself elsewhere states that he is “fairly sure,” as distinct from positive,
that Hand D is Shakespeare’s. May I add that while “most collected works of Shakespeare” have included the Additions
to Sir Thomas More, it is also true that three leading editions in 1997 (Norton, Riverside, and Bevington) included
Funeral Elegy “by W.S.”; the poem was subsequently dropped when Prof. Donald Foster’s claim was debunked.

As I am sure you know, the British Library’s announcement was picked up by media worldwide. Many, perhaps
most media ran the identification of the Hand D Additions as Shakespeare’s without qualification, and most media
ran the facsimile. It is unfortunate that the British Library’s prestigious reputation is sufficient to assure
readers and listeners that Shakespeare did indeed leave behind a personal literary paper trail.
Short of a corrected announcement, it is difficult for me to imagine how to counter the impression that
the controversy over Hand D is now settled. Perhaps you have already considered other options.

I hope you will share this message with your Chairman, Baroness Blackstone. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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